All users who do not use our default Oxygen widget style and window decoration might have had an unpleasant surprise after upgrading to 4.7. Our old shadow effect provided generic shadows for all windows no matter which widget style or decoration is used. In case the decoration provided its own shadow that one was preferred.
The new shadow system does not provide any generic shadow. The compositor is just providing a service to the widget style for rendering the shadow. This means that the widget style has to implement support for the new shadows. This has been done at least for Oxygen and Bespin, but it might also be added for other styles – so if you miss your shadows, check whether there is a new version of your preferred style, get in contact with the author of the style or best of all: provide a patch.
Of course there is also the option to add a generic implementation again to KWin (which seems to be a need), though I must say that I will not spend any time on that myself. Given the experience from our old shadow effect, it is my belief that you cannot have a generic shadow which looks good with all widget styles, windows and color schemes. Nevertheless I am open to patches which add a generic shadow which can be used if decoration and widget style do not provide a shadow. The basic ideas of the new Shadow system are documented in our wiki. If you want to work on it and have questions just get in touch with us through either #kwin or #plasma on freenode or kwin at kde dot org.
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