Re: GTK+, WM, desktops and CSD

[Paul Davis <paul linuxaudiosystems com>]

On Thu, Mar 5, 2015 at 5:44 PM, Allin Cottrell <cottrell wfu edu> wrote:

On Thu, 5 Mar 2015, Florian Müllner wrote:

The worst thing that can happen when the toolkit forcefully rips CSD from applications is that there is no more UI to save, navigate, load or whatever essential UI the applications happens to put into its decorations.

Isn't there some dissonance here: "essential UI" embedded in "decorations"? How did we come to this? I can sort of see why if metacity is taken as the baseline, since metacity in its default appearance suffered from a severe case of macroencephaly: a huge wasteland of bare forehead holding a bloated boldface window title and little else. But why not fix the WM (not all WMs waste anything like that amount of desktop) rather than conflating UI with decoration?

consider a simple dialog. Should it have a close button or not? If the application adds an explicit close button, there are now two areas of the window as displayed by most WMs which will, upon being clicked, cause the window to be hidden. So should the application add its own?   Or should it tell the WM that it would like a "close" button to be added? If it does the latter, is this "close" button "decoration" or "essential function" ?