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

[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.

[andyprough]

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

[flux242]

didn't they drop gtk2 support already in 4.14?

[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.

[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.

[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...)

[Awesomeness]

Needlessly huge and ugly.

[willbprog177]

Actually CSD is more efficient overall. It allows solving of some problems that are difficult or unsolvable with SSD, and what it REALLY is is having the toolkit handle decoration on the client side, so it doesn't mean "every app is custom". Drawing your own in your app is perfectly possible in X11 - just set WM hinds to have your window be borderless then draw your own. It also opens up possibilities to new ideas and saving space (e.g. re-using the titlebar for tabs...). Chrome has been doing this by default for many years. x11amp did it decades ago and many apps like it do still. Nothing new there at all. If you truly want to do your own decorations you can and have been able to forever (and before people uses MWM hints for being borderless you could just abuse override-redirect windows that bypass the WM entirely).

FYI i'm both a WM, Compositor, Application and toolkit author (X11 and Wayland), so I see the problem space for all the angles and am not just blinded by one view. I'm also old and crusty. My initial reaction to CSD was "ewwww". But I thought about it deeply and changed my mind. The problems with CSD are about abuse, not use. Abuse is already possible and has been "forever". Some decisions about how to do CSD are probably bad - but it'd be just as bad if WM's decided to move titlebars to the bottom of windows on dialogs too (for example) that break habits, expectations and flow.

Thank you all for the explanation. I appreciate it!

[archsway]

Actually CSD is more efficient overall. It allows solving of some problems that are difficult or unsolvable with SSD, and what it REALLY is is having the toolkit handle decoration on the client side, so it doesn't mean "every app is custom".

It also introduces a pile more unsolvable problems, such as making it impossible to do window tabs (multiple applications sharing one titlebar) without wasting even more space.

[raster]

It also introduces a pile more unsolvable problems, such as making it impossible to do window tabs (multiple applications sharing one titlebar) without wasting even more space.

Congratulations. you found one thing it's not good at. There is thus a protocol that exists to request the client not decorate in Wayland (not universally supported yet - but it's necessary for things like tiling WMs to look nice, so eventually will be).

You may have missed the bit where I was doing an overall evaluation from all the angles... But hey... everyone has their ax to grind.