Cinnamon: Blur effect needed on transparency

[mfreeman72]

```

• Cinnamon version 4.4.8
• Distribution - Mint 19.3
• Graphics hardware - AMD A8 GPU (Radeon R5) with current open source driver
• 64 bit
  ```

Issue
Any time a transparency is used (especially panels and panel menus), any text or hard lines/textures behind it make text on the menu difficult to read. I would like to request an optional blurred effect behind transparencies. I know that this has been discussed in the past, and it used to be possible to put a bump map image behind it (that's not necessarily what I'm looking for, but it had a similar result), but that issue has been closed with no resolution. I would like to see just a simple, basic blur implemented. Other desktops have this feature, and it not only looks really nice, but makes text on transparent menus and panels much more readable by softening hard lines behind them. Please consider this for future Cinnamon versions.

[brownsr]

There's a PR in for this. Still work in progress as there was a stability fault found at the last stage.

Regards

Simon

[viliampucik]

@brownsr Please let me ask you what is the status of the PR? BTW is there a way one can help with the code or its testing?

[brownsr]

@viliampucik I have not found time to work on the PR for a while. You will see it in the list of open PRs, marked WIP. There were two problems, the first is a segfault. I never had that, my suspicion is that it might be caused by having two simultaneous such effects (blur and bumpmap) on at the same time. A case I never tried during development. If so then that would not probably be that hard to debug.The other was that as a screen snapshot effect, it was very 'busy' on something like the menu where it reacted to menu bar highlighting and pointer movement. I had planned to research the menu to find if there was a more appropriate piece of CSS to try it on, as ideally it should be applied just to the menu background and not to the active menu elements such as the current menu item or the mouse. If you want to pick up on this and send any resulting changes to me then that might be very helpful. Or copy the PR, amend, and send in separately of course.

Regards

Simon

[viliampucik]

Many thanks @brownsr for the details, really appreciated! I am going to familiarize myself with the internals and hopefully test and submit PR in the near future.

Recently I have switched from Deepin to Cinnamon and I really like the work that has been done in Cinnamon. The transparent and bluer effect offered by Deepin and UKUI make those environments stood out. If Cinnamon provides such eye candy as well, it may attract more users and contributors to this nice project.

[nelwa]

Are there any new developments regarding this feature? I would also like this eye candy blur effect to be available.