Question

As told here Qt: Erase background (Windows Aero Glass), I’m using WA_TranslucentBackground to have a glass background on my QMainWindow: on Windows 7 (Aero enabled) it works well, but on Linux (KDE4) I get a black background, I haven’t tried on a PC with Aero disabled, or maybe older than Vista.

Is there a way to check if Aero is available and enabled, so I can set WA_TranslucentBackground only if it’s enabled, and keep the standard background on Linux and Windows without Aero?

It seems that Windows API’s DwmIsCompositionEnabled does the job, but I cannot find how to call it from Python, also taking in account that it may not exist on pre-Vista versions.

Answer 1

You can try something like the following. It should handle being run on non-Windows platforms, and also the absence of the DwmIsCompositionEnabled function:

import ctypes

def is_aero_enabled():
    try:
        b = ctypes.c_bool()
        retcode = ctypes.windll.dwmapi.DwmIsCompositionEnabled(ctypes.byref(b))
        return (retcode == 0 and b.value)
    except AttributeError:
        # No windll, no dwmapi or no DwmIsCompositionEnabled function.
        return False

On my Windows 7 machine, this returns True.