The CSD Initiative Is Pushing For Apps To Abandon Title Bars In Favor Of Header Bars

[Charlie68]

I have no issue with people not liking Gnome. We get it, you hate it, and you've every right to, it's a very divisive DE. The beauty of Linux is you can just use something else, it's kind of a running joke how ridiculous it is that there are so many DEs/WMs on Linux.

Personally I like Gnome, I like that there's a company that puts out software that doesn't feel like it's designed by committee. Gnome feels like the racehorse to KDEs camel. They have a singular vision to push forward their idea for their ideal desktop. They favour simplicity over customizability. That's not a drawback, it's a design decision. I like that I can install Gnome on Arch and it looks and feels great out of the box.

I want to love KDE, I want to have the time to learn i3, I want XFCE not to suck, but none of these things are the case. Gnome works for me, it's appropriate for my workflow and it appeals to what I want from a Linux desktop.

Gnome is simple if you do not use it! But whatever you need to do, you are forced to use configuration and terminal files. Is this simplicity? There is not even a tool for startup applications! I have a different vision of simplicity, my vision is that if I want to create for example a launcher can do it quickly with a tool, this happens well or badly on all modern DE.

[pal666]

If they want devs to jump into their bandwagon, then they should start by making a CSD switch in their applications so that they are optional and can be turned off by other desktop environments and the people who hate them.

csd vs ssd is technical matter, invisible to people, and people who hate them are uninformed idiots. now talking about developers, csd do not make your app look "alien" because csd only affects 1% of your app with other 99% unaffected. so sane developer would be concerned more about 99% of app alien to desktop and to now this 1% of ssd. and sane devs long ago found solution for this issue, it is called "themes". so with csd you have to employ theming to draw not just 99% of app, but to draw app as a whole. and if you can't do that, then maybe you should wipe floors instead of software development. there is a reason why real developers behind gnome and weston use csd: it does not require additional step of composing app with csd, which can be suboptimal

[pal666]

Personally I like Gnome, I like that there's a company that puts out software that doesn't feel like it's designed by committee.

everything of value is designed by committee, including gnome. but some committees are better than others at design, just like people

[pal666]

CSD is idiotic. How should I know if user prefers dark/bright theme, small/large buttons, needs high contrast etc...

same way as it know when idiots prefer dark/bright theme, small/large buttons, needs high contrast etc... for other 99% of window area.
or idiots need high contrast for titlebar only, because idiots only use titlebars and ignore window content?

[omer666]

They may be trying to shape a better user experience, but there's no consensus that they're actually succeeding. I do not think headerbars are a better user experience, and going by the comments in this thread, I am far from alone in that thinking. That's the issue in your argumentation, you're equating "different" with "better". But something being different does not automatically make it better

I agree with your last sentence. What I mean is that I got the impression this happens every time something is being tried on that front. Of course on my end I do think CSD is great, but one could also argue in favour of fully tiled windowing or top-screen menus like in Unity, I think it's relevant as well (BTW, it looks like Unity gained much more acceptance over the years, whereas it was almost heresy when it got released.) I found that when it's well implemented, CSD makes for an easier workflow and pushes the useful commands to the front, instead of hiding them in sub-menus, making for a whole more user-friendly experience. But it's only my opinion, of course.

[ssokolow]

DWD - dynamic window decorations, where an application politely asks the SSD compositor if it can draw some widgets in their title bar. Originally proposed for KDE, but looks like it is on the back burner for now.

Not quite. It politely asks the WM to draw some widgets in its titlebar. Aside from "Visible. Hide the corresponding internal widgets" vs. "No room. Show the corresponding internal widgets", it has no idea where they're actually getting drawn.

This WM-drawn design akin to KStatusNotifierItem/libappindicator is intended to allow any number of heterogeneously-rendered copies of the DWD widgets to exist simultaneously so it's possible to do things like exporting copies of them to a paired smartphone app with a more touch-appropriate visual representation or auto-publishing them through a D-Bus API à la AppleScript.

[ssokolow]

csd vs ssd is technical matter, invisible to people, and people who hate them are uninformed idiots. now talking about developers, csd do not make your app look "alien" because csd only affects 1% of your app with other 99% unaffected. so sane developer would be concerned more about 99% of app alien to desktop and to now this 1% of ssd. and sane devs long ago found solution for this issue, it is called "themes". so with csd you have to employ theming to draw not just 99% of app, but to draw app as a whole. and if you can't do that, then maybe you should wipe floors instead of software development. there is a reason why real developers behind gnome and weston use csd: it does not require additional step of composing app with csd, which can be suboptimal

Not necessarily. I'm very much informed and I "hate" (strongly dislike) CSD because I prefer consistency between different application titlebars over consistency between an application's titlebar and its widgets. (Especially given that GTK+ 3.x, which is required for Wayland support, breaks QGTKStyle, which I rely on for ensuring consistency between my Qt and GTK+ 2.x applications.)

(It's for that reason that I was surprised when I discovered Weston was CSD-based. Given the Wayland focus on security and keeping users in control of their desktop, it seems odd that they'd allow potentially malicious applications so much freedom to meddle with the most intuitive workflow for moving and closing windows.)

Among other reasons, that is why I intend to move to KWin as my compositor once it provides a mature alternative to running X11 on top of the nVidia binary drivers. (I'll just replace any applications which don't obey a "Hide your CSD. I'm drawing SSD whether you like it or not." order from it.)

[nuetzel]

'Modern'... - Argh.

[carewolf]

Not from what I can remember from the KDAB offices in Berlin; there was no drugs, but neither were there suits. It was an amazing, laid-back place for people who really liked hacking, though. Damn, this has made me all nostalgic for KOffice/Calligra sprints in Berlin!

I think it was the background and furniture that was similar, not the people or the actions in the comic. Just the actual office, as if whoever drew it had been there.. And it might have been SuSE and not KDAB, it was 10 years ago, around the time of the first desktop summit.

[M@yeulC]

Not quite. It politely asks the WM to draw some widgets in its titlebar. Aside from "Visible. Hide the corresponding internal widgets" vs. "No room. Show the corresponding internal widgets", it has no idea where they're actually getting drawn.

This WM-drawn design akin to KStatusNotifierItem/libappindicator is intended to allow any number of heterogeneously-rendered copies of the DWD widgets to exist simultaneously so it's possible to do things like exporting copies of them to a paired smartphone app with a more touch-appropriate visual representation or auto-publishing them through a D-Bus API à la AppleScript.

Could you elaborate a bit on the WM vs compositor distinction? To me they are the same, and this is an artificial distinction; maybe that's more true on wayland though. Do you make this distinction trough the protocol? (d-bus vs wayland -- I don't even know what the message passing interface is with wayland? A C API?).

And yes, you are right about the later part, it could be used for fun (albeit of doubtful usefulness) things such as publishing those actions to the touchbar on Mac or KDEconnect on phones :P

Anyway, I created #dwd_discussion on freenode to try to gather some people to discuss this with.