Suggestion: Mica

With the release of Windows 11, Microsoft added some new backdrop types, Mica, Mica alt etc.

It would be really cool to see these available in Opus. For example, my Windows 11 theme for Opus is missing Mica for the top toolbar background. I'm also sure many other people who wish Opus to feel more as part of the Windows 11 OS would also like this feature.

Maybe this could be added to toolbar settings, or in the actual preferences section. I'm not a developer so I'm not the best to judge where the setting should be placed.

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You can apply any background texture you like via background images (which can span the whole window if you pick the “shared” option).

We are weary of spending significant time implementing support for Mica itself. Microsoft have a long history of introducing cosmetic gimmicks like that in one version of Windows, convincing developers to spend a lot of time modifying code to support them, and then breaking and abandoning them a version or two later of the OS, leaving developers having to support and test multiple rendering modes on different OS versions (where you can’t even test the old mode on a new OS, as they removed it), and feeling like they wasted their time. We’ve been burned by it several times in the past. E.g. Glass was added in Vista and still there in Win7, but broken in Win8; then Win10 added back an almost identical effect, but only if you used a completely different API, while the original glass API we invested months of work into remains broken to this day.

Microsoft do this stuff without any long term plan for supporting it in the future.

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