Xfce 4.16 Is Making Good Progress On Utilizing GTK3 Client-Side Decorations

[Mavman]

It saves a lot of space especially in the settings windows, why shouldn't I be happy?

It does???

On Plasma, if i set the taskbar to the Left||Right side of screen _and_ put the Application Menu on a Menu Button on the Application Titlebar, i get the same vertical space (but with the titlebar which i hold as really useful - if i were to remove it, as in Firefox, i actually get More Vertical space that i would get on gnome...)

[skeevy420]

I'm an old dude, who likes 'legacy', stuff I guess. I don't see the point of CSD. To me it seems like a waste of system resources. Instead of having a window manager that manages the decorations on each window, we now will have each client draw its own? So does this mean it's going to be like Windows, where some apps have the native decorations while every third-party app has some dorky-looking non-native totally different decorations? I'll crawl back under my X11 rock now

That's me.

I started using Linux 20 years ago with Gnome 2 and did that for a few years. When Gnome 3 came out I switched to XFCE and was happy until the GTK3 porting started. Saw where GTK3 and CSD was heading and I switched to Plasma. I've used Plasma ever since and don't plan on ever using Gnome or XFCE again. If XFCE was still using GTK2 I'd still be an XFCE user.

The CSD/GTK3 design choices are just not pretty or appealing to my tastes and they waste way too much screen real estate. Use a 40" or bigger monitor and 1080p or higher and you'll start to understand just how much the CSD/GTK3 design style wastes space.

I don't have a problem with CSD or GTK3 from a technical perspective. My problem is with the design choices they made to standardize around and how it is very, very clearly standardized around a touch interface on a smaller screen. Like I said, I use a very large screen and those design choices just do not work well.

Plasma and Enlightenment are the only desktop environments that offer the right tools and settings to allow me to tweak my desktop to my liking.

I'd be a lot less critical of Gnome 3 if it offered better and more UI and scaling options out of the box (like Plasma, Mate, Enlightenment, Cinnamon, XFCE do) versus making me have to keep up with third party plugins that aren't managed by my system's package manager -- I left Windows because of that no package manager for critical components bullshit.

[skeevy420]

Leaving because of CSD? lol ... disable them with things like "gtk3-nocsd", problem solved.

It really doesn't look that nice and these days it is starting to look even more out of place than vanilla gtk3 on my Plasma desktop since a few 3rd party QT programs are following the GTK3 styling.

Honestly, some programs look downright retarded with both a headerbar and a titlebar when gtk3-nocsd is used.

[flux242]

didn't they drop gtk2 support already in 4.14?

[andyprough]

Reinventing Gnome3. Brilliant. That's one way to really stick with your project goals, xfce.

[Britoid]

Seeing as Gtk4 will be out soon, any idea if it'll be easier for them to switch to 4 than it was for them to switch to 3?

The GTK3 => GTK4 migration is a lot easier than GTK2 => GTK3 and there are scripts to automate a large part of it, however it would still require a small amount of manual work.

[Mike Frett]

Leaving because of CSD? lol ... disable them with things like "gtk3-nocsd", problem solved.

[FireBurn]

Seeing as Gtk4 will be out soon, any idea if it'll be easier for them to switch to 4 than it was for them to switch to 3?

[Britoid]

No one has mentioned what I see as the biggest problem with this decision, and that's Wayland. Specifically in the context of losing virtualization guest optimizations. Maybe Virtualbox and Vmware will figure out how to accelerate Wayland. But as it is now, X11 is about the only way to get acceptable performance from a VM. At least, when using it interactively as a GUI user.

That's really the only reason I use XFCE now. I get that X11 has problems and needs to go away. And that compositing is the future. But that also means that, for me personally, XFCE has lost its main advantage as a desktop environment. (I mean, there's not much about I really _don't_ like.)

Wayland runs under KVM/libvirt/Gnome Boxes okay.

[Bubbles_by_day]

No one has mentioned what I see as the biggest problem with this decision, and that's Wayland. Specifically in the context of losing virtualization guest optimizations. Maybe Virtualbox and Vmware will figure out how to accelerate Wayland. But as it is now, X11 is about the only way to get acceptable performance from a VM. At least, when using it interactively as a GUI user.

That's really the only reason I use XFCE now. I get that X11 has problems and needs to go away. And that compositing is the future. But that also means that, for me personally, XFCE has lost its main advantage as a desktop environment. (I mean, there's not much about I really _don't_ like.)