v12-rc3

(This is likely the last release candidate for v12)

Changes since v12-rc2

Bug fixes

• transparent-clipping has no effect (#1317)
• unredir in window rules not being parsed correctly
• Changing window opacity with picom-trans does not take effect immediately (#1315)

Documentation

• Document behavior change around rounded corners and fullscreen windows

v12-rc2

Known issues

• transparent-clipping has no effect (#1317)
• Change of window opacity property doesn't take effect immediately (#1315)

Change since v12-rc1

Bug fixes

• Setting corner-radius to 0 cause all windows to not render: #1311
• Setting corner-radius causes windows to have a 1-pixel transparent border
• Window shaders no longer work: #1312

v12-rc1

Known issues

• Setting corner-radius to 0 cause all windows to not render: #1311, fixed by 6b858b8
• Window shaders no longer work: #1312, fixed by fda04bd

New features

• Animations! Yes, now picom officially supports animations. For examples, and information on how to configure it, please go to our documentation site. There are some video clips in #1253 as well. (#1220 #1253 #1303 #1305 #1308 #1310)

• Universal window rules (#1284). One option to rule them all! Added new configuration option rules to replace all existing rule options, and to provide more flexibility on top of that. See picom(1) for more details. This can be used to configure per-window animations.

• @include directives in config file now also search in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/picom/include and $XDG_CONFIG_DIRS/picom/include, in addition to relative to the config file's parent directory.

• Allow corner-radius-rules to override corner-radius = 0. Previously setting corner radius to 0 globally disables rounded corners. (#1170)

• New picom-inspect tool, which lets you test out your picom rules. man picom-inspect(1) for more details. Sample output:

  ...
  Checking rounded-corners-exclude:
      window_type = "dock" ... not matched
      window_type = "desktop" ... not matched
      window_type *= "menu" ... not matched
      fullscreen = 1 ... not matched
  Checking opacity-rule:
      _NET_WM_STATE@[0] *= "_NET_WM_STATE_HIDDEN" ... not matched
  Checking corner-radius-rule:
      class_g = "Alacritty" ... matched/10
  
  Here are some rule(s) that match this window:
      name = '[0.2.1] ./picom-inspect: ~/p/picom(./picom-inspect: ~/p/picom)*'
      class_i = 'Alacritty'
      class_g = 'Alacritty'
      window_type = 'normal'
      ! fullscreen
      border_width = 0
  

• picom now has a rudimentary plugin system. At the moment, the only thing you can do with it is loading custom backends.

Notable changes

• override_redirect in rules now only matches top-level windows that doesn't have a client window. Some window managers (e.g. awesome) set override_redirect for all window manager frame windows, causing this rule to match against everything (#625).
• Marginally improve performance when resizing/opening/closing windows. (#1190)
• Type and format specifiers are no longer used in rules. These specifiers are what you put after the colon (':') in rules, e.g. the :32c in "_GTK_FRAME_EXTENTS@:32c". Now this information is ignored and the property is matched regardless of format or type.
• backend is now a required option. picom will not start if one is not specified explicitly.
• New predefined target for conditions: group_focused. This target indicate whether the focused window is in the same window group as the window being matched.
• Meaning of window_type in conditions changed slightly, now it supports windows with multiple types. (However the behavior of wintypes remains unchanged.)

Deprecated features

• Setting --shadow-exclude-reg is now a hard error. It was deprecated almost since the start of picom. --clip-shadow-above is the better alternative. (#1254)
• Remove command line options -n, -a, and -s. They were removed more than 10 years ago, it's time to finally get rid of them entirely. (#1254)
• Remove error message for --glx-swap-method, it was deprecated in v6.
• Remove error message for passing argument to --vsync arguments, it was deprecated in v5.
• Option --opengl is now deprecated, use --backend=glx instead.

Bug fixes

• Fix ghosting artifacts that sometimes occur when window manager is restarted (#1081)
• Fix a bug where rounded corner is disabled after making a window fullscreen and back (#1216)
• Fix ugly looking rounded corners (#1261)

Build changes

• picom now uses some OpenGL 4.3 features.
• picom now optionally depends on rtkit at runtime to give itself realtime scheduling priority.
• libconfig is now a mandatory dependency, with a minimal supported version of 1.7.
• xcb-dpms is not needed anymore.
• libXext is not needed anymore.
• man pages are now built with asciidoctor, instead of asciidoc.

Behind the scene changes

• The X critical section is removed, picom no longer grabs the server to fetch updates. Hopefully, if everything works, this change is unnoticeable. Minor responsiveness improvements could be possible, but I won't bet on it. The main point of this change is this makes debugging much less painful. Previously if you breaks inside the X critical section, the whole X server will lock up, and you would have to connect to the computer remotely to recover. Now there is no longer such worries. This also avoids a bug inside Xorg that makes server grabbing unreliable.

v11.2

Changes since v11.1

Build changes

• picom now depends on libepoxy for OpenGL symbol management.

Bug fixes

• Workaround a NVIDIA problem that causes high CPU usage after suspend/resume (#1172, #1168)
• Fix building on OpenBSD (#1189, #1188)
• Fix occasional freezes (#1040, #1145, #1166)
• Fix corner-radius-rules not applying sometimes (#1177)
• Fix window shader not having an effect when frame opacity is enabled (#1174)
• Fix binding root pixmap in case of depth mismatch (#984)

v11.1

Changes since v11

Bug fixes

• Fix missing fading on window close for some window managers. (#704)
• Temporary duct tape that should reduce the chance of getting freezes from the xrender backend. (#1166)

v11

Changes since v11-rc1

Build changes

• Due to some caveats discovered related to setting the CAP_SYS_NICE capability, it is now recommended to NOT set this capability for picom.

Deprecations

• Uses of --sw-opti, and --respect-prop-shadow are now hard errors.
• -F has been removed completely. It was deprecated before the picom fork.

v11-rc1

Announcements

New collaborators

Welcome @absolutelynothelix who has joined as our newest collaborator! 🎉

Discord server

We have a discord server now! Join to chat with developers and other picom users.

Changelog

Notable features

• picom now uses dithering to prevent banding. Banding is most notable when using a strong background blur. (#952)
• Frame pacing. picom uses present feedback information to schedule new frames when it makes sense to do so. This improves latency, and replaces the glFlush and GL_MaxFramesAllowed=1 hacks we used to do for NVIDIA. (#968 #1156)
• Some missing features have been implemented for the EGL backend (#1004 #1007)

Bug fixes

• Many memory/resource leak fixes thanks to @absolutelynothelix . (#977 #978 #979 #980 #982 #985 #992 #1009 #1022)
• Fix tiling of wallpaper. (#1002)
• Fix some blur artifacts (#1095)
• Fix shadow color for transparent shadows (#1124)
• Don't spam logs when another compositor is running (#1104)
• Fix rounded corners showing as black with the xrender backend (#1003)
• Fix blur with rounded windows (#950)

Build changes

• Dependency pcre has been replaced by pcre2.
• New dependency xcb-util.
• xinerama is no longer used.
• picom now tries to give itself a real-time scheduling priority. Please consider giving picom the CAP_SYS_NICE capability when packaging it.

Deprecations

• The kawase blur method is removed. Note this is just an alias to the dual_kawase method, which is still available. (#1102)

New first time contributors

@i-c-u-p @summaryInfo @EpsilonKu @Monsterovich @softmoth @tokyoneon78

v10.2

This is a bug fix release:

Fixes

• Window border not being considered when calculating its mask (Thanks @summaryInfo, #950)

v10.1

This is a bug fix release.

Fixes:

• A GL texture leak, related to #892
• A crash when shadow radius is set to 0 (#927)
• An undefined symbol error (#932)

v10

Changes

None since v10-rc2

(See also v10-rc1 and v10-rc2)