8 ms·

Sigh, are they seriously bringing GTK3's client-side decorations and lack of title bars to Xfce??! Applications should have title bars. This is how it's been d

by near 10y ago

Sigh, are they seriously bringing GTK3's client-side decorations and lack of title bars to Xfce??! Applications should have title bars. This is how it's been done everywhere since pretty much the first Xerox GUI. Monitors are bigger than ever today. I promise, people can spare 10 pixels of vertical space so that they can see the name of the application being run (and the name of documents open in said application), and have a very easy area to click on to move the window around with. GTK3 CSDs also break the user's ability to choose a window manager theme. It also removes the possibility to disable the toolbar area from certain applications, eg text editors. They also tend to result in applications that lack traditional menubars, which are very useful for complex programs. I have already dropped every last Gnome 3 application over this nonsense. This is going to be horrendous to have to stop using Xfce now, too. Sorry, I know HN doesn't like negativity, but this "change for the sake of it" stuff is getting really old. I just want to keep using my computer the way that's worked just fine for me for the past 25 years. This really is a step backward in usability. I don't want to have to target tiny slivers between widgets, or hold down Alt to move windows around. And for applications I want an actual toolbar in, I don't like how most of the toolbar icons disappear so that things can be merged into the titlebar area.

macco 10y ago
Use Kde or LxQt, not CSD's there.
kelnos 10y ago
The one thing I'm looking forward to with a GTK3-ified Xfce is better HiDPI support. GTK2 on a 352dpi screen is miserable. I agree with you on CSDs, though; they're horrible and take control away from me, and make windows drawn by different toolkits look different... why would I ever want that?
darren0 10y ago
I share your frustrations with CSDs but just because they are moving to GTK3 doesn't mean they will adopt CSDs. Can you refer me to what you saw that indicated they would do this? Or do I misunderstand that these two things are in fact coupled?
- byuu 10y ago
  Yes, I certainly can. Before: https://simon.shimmerproject.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2017/02/taskman_1.2.0.png https://simon.shimmerproject.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/... After: https://simon.shimmerproject.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2017/02/taskman_gtk3.png https://simon.shimmerproject.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/... The old title bar plus toolbar combined took up 56 pixels of vertical space. The new version takes up 46 pixels, loses the title display, two of the toolbar buttons, and two of the dropdown arrows. And you're not going to be able to simply turn off the toolbar anymore, like you often could in traditional applications (I often do this in text editors, for instance.) > Or do I misunderstand that these two things are in fact coupled? This part is really tricky. GTK3 itself does not mandate CSDs, although it does force them onto all of its common dialogs. Gnome 3 tends to take this to the extreme and is trying to remove any and all title bars from every application of theirs. I can live with my file open/save dialog not having a title bar, but I don't want my main windows to lack them as well =(
  - pantalaimon 10y ago
    And apparently GTK3 also lost the ability to visually distinguish between columns?
    - byuu 10y ago
      Yeah ... truly, every single visual thing about the new task manager is worse than it was before on GTK2 =(
abrowne 10y ago
MATE has moved to GTK+ 3 without CSDs. You may encounter them in GNOME apps, like e.g. GNOME Disks, which I use under MATE, but none of the MATE apps use them.
- byuu 10y ago
  Yeah, depending on how badly this infests Xfce, I may have to switch to MATE. If it's just the task manager, then I can fall back to 'top' in a terminal window until I can write my own replacement. But if they start doing it to Thunar, Mousepad, xfce4-terminal, the settings control panel, etc ... then I'll have to abandon ship :(
  - ufo 10y ago
    Have you ever had a look at htop? I prefer it to both top and the GUI alternatives.
    - byuu 10y ago
      No, but I will check it out, thanks for the recommendation!
mynewtb 10y ago
Hear hear! That would be the end of 10(?) years of xfce for me. Evince for example now seems to use more vertical space for its header but with much less use, thanks to huge, flat, cryptic icons. Luckily there is a light version available that uses gtk 2. I also want to use my scrollwheel to scroll dropdown menus without opening them, or be able to select folders in an 'open' dialog without that stupid thing directly descending into them just because they were highlighted. Hrrrgahnng!
reitanqild 10y ago
Sorry, I know HN doesn't like negativity, but this "change for the sake of it" stuff is getting really old. Agree. I sense I am getting old and grumpy but there is something to learn here: there seems to be an increasing number of people, even in open source, who just want stuff to work. I just want Ubuntu, dropline gnome, updated drivers, backed by a commercial vendor that I can pay a reasonable amount to to make sure they never let designers, ux people, product managers etc experiment with my desktop. Polishing it like Ubuntu originally did was totally ok though. I don't want "spatial navigation" in Gnome. I don't want to have to think application or document" when I hit alt-tab, or having to wait for a (IMO, I know some people love this feature, but bear with my rant here) retarded alt-tab to understand that I want to switch to a document under the app I have switched to, then wait again for it to slide out nicely. No! I want alt tab to switch through my last used windows. If it looks really nice, bonus. I want my drivers to work. Etc. And most of all: I don't want Linux to copy Mac! If I want a Mac I can get my boss to get me one!
- digi_owl 10y ago
  Bingo. The best "DE" or WM is the one that you virtually forget is there. The sad part is that the DE boys keep thinking that more eyecandy and bling will bring in the users and thus the third party software (apps? bah!) devs. But as JWZ put it, Gnome (and most of the XDG related stuff) is beset with CADT. They fail to see that the one thing that has kept Windows where it is right now is that some company can still run their bespoke business code that was written back in the Windows 3.11 days. Damn it, they can't even manage to do minor updates to glib and related without introducing subtle breakages. And no, Flatpak and related is not a fix. That will just bring the specter of DLL hell to Linux.
  - Twirrim 10y ago
    CADT?
    - fnj 10y ago
      Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers
digi_owl 10y ago
They effectively have no choice. Right now there are two major toolkits for DEs, GTK and Qt. And the former is under the control of Gnome, and thus more and more Gnome-isms will make their way into it. So either the already notoriously understaffed XFCE has to fork GTK2, or move to Qt. Effectively we are learning that there is yet another way to hijack freedoms that the FSF do not consider, code churn. Or if one want to be a bit conspiratorial, code churn is what the FSF relies upon to maintain its other freedoms.
- byuu 10y ago
  I feel like they still have a choice ... at least for now. CSDs are still optional in GTK3. True, they are forced on for the common dialogs, so if you use GTK's file chooser or font picker, then you're going to end up with them. But at least then they're child modal dialogs to a parent application. The Gnome 3 desktop team decided to move every application possible to them, but there's no reason Xfce has to follow suit there. Again, at least for now. It's certainly possible the GTK team will decide to enforce this and remove the option for window manager decorations in a future release. I would really love to see a maintained fork of GTK2, however.
  - irq-1 10y ago
    CADT == Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html
- zanny 10y ago
  It isn't the job of people writing code for free to write anything but what they want to with it. If XFCE wanted to stabilize GTK, they could try to do that with a fork, but there was no bait and switch - it has always been the Gnome ToolKit. You should probably consider that before building desktops based off it that are not Gnome - its future developments are by Gnome, for Gnome. If the fragmented ecosystems on the fringes of GTK - Elementary, XFCE, and Mate - were united, they could have easily forked GTK2 or 3 and maintained their own independent stable toolkit. Hell, the Gnome developers might have appreciated a wider swathe of developers working on it and switched to the fork with a transition to a plugin model for all the Gnome extras than constant churn in the toolkit. Code churn for the sake of it can definitely be a hostile tactic, but GTK churns because Gnome is constantly changing at the whims of its developers in their pursuit of their own ideal desktop. Unless you are paying them for their time or contributing code yourself to their projects, why should you have higher priority over their own desires or those of their immediate users of their whole software suite?
zanny 10y ago
I'm on the opposite side, in that I'm a KDE user / infrequent contributor that has some jealousy for the good use of space Gnome manages to pull off with its decorations. Your only real use for the title bar is a drag zone. Effectively a button to hold down. It doesn't need to occupy the entire horizontal width of your screen to do that. Gnome applications still show the same text information, they just have added buttons there as well to waste less space. You still have ample drag room. If a program doesn't have enough room for buttons or makes their CSD menu buttons obscure that is a design failure distinct from the bar itself. It is just a space saving measure. While screens are bigger, the vertical area is the premium, and wasting a 15px+ of it on an average of 20 characters of text and two buttons should be somewhere to look for improvement in.
- notalaser 10y ago
  I'm pretty sure that whatever Gnome saved with CSDs has been more than offset by the huge Adwaita widgets. It's bloody hilarious, Firefox's menubar is almost as thick as a GTK2 menubar + a relatively thin decoration just because of the huge space around the text. It's great on all the three tablets that can run Gnome and on the super high-DPI touchscreens that I presume its developers are runings. The rest of us plebs, however, have to stare at the bulkiest widgets since the days when the Industrial GTK theme was a thing. (Certainly, that could be solved with a different them, if a different theme would work for more than three frickin' months...) It also doesn't help that the menubar-toolbar-titlebar mix works great for full-screen windows, and anything but if you're running several non-maximized windows side by side. It's like someone shoved several small iPads on my desktop. It's pretty difficult to even make a decent case that window decorations were broken; I find it much, much harder to make a case that this is the proper way to fix it. Edit: it's also going to be so "fun" to get a desktop where some applications have CSDs and some don't, which is pretty much what we're heading to. Just like back in the days when Xlib and Athena widgets were a thing, I am so totally nostalgic for that.
- byuu 10y ago
  But it's not saving space. It's literally ten pixels shorter in return for 4-5 major downsides I listed. And if you were to turn off toolbars (which you can't with these title-toolbars), then it's actually a 30 pixel INCREASE in window height.
flushandforget 10y ago
I don't see why we can't semantically define menus and tasks. And have different interfaces that can just plug into these. So if you don't want titles - fine - use a different window manager or style. I can think of many better ways of doing desktop windowing/application behaviour. I have two debian installs. One with old and the other with new debian/xfce/gnome. And although I probably prefer the older debian/xfce combo to alternatives - I can't say I'm particularly smitten.
scrollaway 10y ago
This isn't xfce's fault. GTK2 is discontinued and they don't have a lot of manpower, certainly not enough to port to Qt or fork GTK2. Can I recommend LXQt? I used to work on it and I still use it today. Simple DE that gets out of your way and has no CSDs.
zeveb 10y ago
> have a very easy area to click on to move the window around with. I use a tiling WM, so I don't need to click to move windows:-) Which makes client-side decorations even more evil: I've explicitly decided that I don't want to waste pixels on decorations, and yet programs are now deciding to do so on my behalf anyway. I run emacs without a menubar, toolbar or scrollbar; I run a terminal without any of that cruft. Why would I want all that drek added back? Give me an interface I can use, and a good info system to learn about it; don't give me an interface with training wheels.
thwarted 10y ago
Monitors are bigger than ever today. I promise, people can spare 10 pixels of vertical space so that they can see the name of the application being run (and the name of documents open in said application), and have a very easy area to click on to move the window around with. All gnome3 apps on my current xfce desktop have these huge non-titlebar titlebars with massive amounts of whitespace and big buttons that may or may not be menus, all the while trying to optimize for bogus density; to wit: However, it also features a new (round) style for GtkSwitches, which makes them take up less space. Sweet!
chmln 10y ago
Anecdotally, I find GTK3 title bars much more aesthetically appealing. [1] If you like title bars, why not just openbox --replace? > I promise, people can spare 10 pixels of vertical space so that they can see the name of the application being run (and the name of documents open in said application), and have a very easy area to click on to move the window around with. Well-developed apps still have relevant titles. [1] Others, like gnome-calculator, don't, but that's developer's fault, not GTK3's. I use speedcrunch instead. > They also tend to result in applications that lack traditional menubars, which are very useful for complex programs. Applications are not at all forced to use CSDs. Sublime has a menu bar, and so do VSCode and Atom. > This is going to be horrendous to have to stop using Xfce now, too. > Sorry, I know HN doesn't like negativity, but this "change for the sake of it" stuff is getting really old Ironically, I find people overreact to changes all the time. Remember the reaction of people when Google changed their logo? With GTK2 going obsolete, there isn't really much of a choice for xfce. [1] http://imgur.com/a/wHTq9 http://imgur.com/a/wHTq9
YSFEJ4SWJUVU6 10y ago
>and have a very easy area to click on to move the window around with. If they are using the other gnome-isms, there seems to be quite an ample (grey) area to use to drag drag the window. Quite a bit easier to click than most traditional openbox themes' titles. Personally I have disabled both title bars and borders – I have no use for them. For me they are actually a little too small to be comfortable target zones; I much prefer alt+drag to move (and alt+right-drag to resize, and alt+middle to send to back), whenever I'm in mood to arrange things around. (I actually have one mouse key mapped for alt, but I haven't got around to learn to use it, as I have a hand on keyboard nearly all the time I'm into playing a window manager, and old habits die hard.) P.S. Do not try this if you often have to use other people's computers for non-trivial tasks. The old way feels so clunky to use it hampers you from the actual task at hand.
arximboldi 10y ago
I love CSD... and I use XMonad. I had to figure out how to not render their own shadow, and to disable the "Close" and "Maximize" buttons and edit the Gtk/DecorationLayout property to taste, but I really appreciate the nice simplified menus they bring, and the removal of the bloated menu bars. They are more usable, specially on a small screen when the window is not full screen (on a tile on the side). I also like CSD when I have to use Gnome itself for the bigger dragging area. Traditional menu bars and title bars is poor UX just to enable certain programming decoupled. Now the the abstractions have evolved and we have widget toolkits and the abstraction is provided without compromising the UX. I am sorry you got used to that. You may still use KDE or something else. But some of us really like what GTK and GNOME people are doing. I know the noisiest voices are the critical ones, so here is a reminder: there are plenty of happy users that love the work you are doing. Thanks a lot, I love you for making my computer work better every day, and with Free Software!
- byuu 10y ago
  I mean, it was great when CSD fans had their Gnome 3, and title/menubar fans had their Xfce. The points I listed aren't just "harumph I don't like change!" complaints, they're actual usability issues for me. I will agree the CSD approach is nicer for tablets and for "less bloat"; but I like the "more power" of a proper menu and toolbar more. It's too bad we can't both be happy. I don't have the resources to develop an entire desktop environment on top of all the projects I'm already working on =(
  - unhammer 10y ago
    I use the "hide titlebar when maximised" option in XFCE. I'd actually prefer hiding it when "snapped" to either side too. Thinking about it, since I tend to use Alt+mousedrag to move and alt+f10 to (un)maximise, I don't think there's a point in having a titlebar for me …
  - arximboldi 10y ago
    That puts things into perspective... and I agree that in the end, with these unresolvable positions, at least with Free Software we get some degree of freedom of choice :) Now that Xfce is being Gnome-ized, have you considered this: http://lxde.org/ http://lxde.org/? Maybe it suits your taste (lightweight, no CSD).
robotiamsowhat 10y ago
> Sorry, I know HN doesn't like negativity But it should, whenever negativity describes reality... I use FVWM. I've been using it back in 1990ties. It worked. It works. It is invisible - I really don't require pah-nels and blinks, so I reduced it (editing config files in real editor, heh) to just virtual desktop, few useful shortcuts and some icons. For some sensory stuff I use gkrellm - it gives me a clock, too. I was using Afterstep, Gnome (2? and 3?) and KDE. All started to fail after one upgrade or another. Unity is a bit too unbearable to me. Came back to FVWM, undusted old configs, all good now. About two months ago I replaced kdeterm with roxterm, which starts about two or three times faster. I guess I am mostly kde- and gnome- free at the moment. I realize I am in some kind of diminishing minority. As long as I can recompile the source I am not going to complain (too much). Strange times. Who would have imagined I would start thinking of game against open source using older version of it? BTW, if there are any FVWM devs here, thank you a lot. And please, I beg you on my knees - do not improve. But just in case, I will stash a source code somewhere.
shakna 10y ago
XFCE was my goto, as it was minimal, cheap on hardware and one-click install, or thereabouts. I guess I have to go back to a custom setup with openbox.

by near 10y ago

macco 10y ago

Use Kde or LxQt, not CSD's there.

kelnos 10y ago

The one thing I'm looking forward to with a GTK3-ified Xfce is better HiDPI support. GTK2 on a 352dpi screen is miserable. I agree with you on CSDs, though; they're horrible and take control away from me, and make windows drawn by different toolkits look different... why would I ever want that?

darren0 10y ago

I share your frustrations with CSDs but just because they are moving to GTK3 doesn't mean they will adopt CSDs. Can you refer me to what you saw that indicated they would do this? Or do I misunderstand that these two things are in fact coupled?

byuu 10y ago
Yes, I certainly can. Before: https://simon.shimmerproject.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2017/02/taskman_1.2.0.png https://simon.shimmerproject.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/... After: https://simon.shimmerproject.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2017/02/taskman_gtk3.png https://simon.shimmerproject.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/... The old title bar plus toolbar combined took up 56 pixels of vertical space. The new version takes up 46 pixels, loses the title display, two of the toolbar buttons, and two of the dropdown arrows. And you're not going to be able to simply turn off the toolbar anymore, like you often could in traditional applications (I often do this in text editors, for instance.) > Or do I misunderstand that these two things are in fact coupled? This part is really tricky. GTK3 itself does not mandate CSDs, although it does force them onto all of its common dialogs. Gnome 3 tends to take this to the extreme and is trying to remove any and all title bars from every application of theirs. I can live with my file open/save dialog not having a title bar, but I don't want my main windows to lack them as well =(
- pantalaimon 10y ago
  And apparently GTK3 also lost the ability to visually distinguish between columns?
  - byuu 10y ago
    Yeah ... truly, every single visual thing about the new task manager is worse than it was before on GTK2 =(

abrowne 10y ago

MATE has moved to GTK+ 3 without CSDs. You may encounter them in GNOME apps, like e.g. GNOME Disks, which I use under MATE, but none of the MATE apps use them.

byuu 10y ago
Yeah, depending on how badly this infests Xfce, I may have to switch to MATE. If it's just the task manager, then I can fall back to 'top' in a terminal window until I can write my own replacement. But if they start doing it to Thunar, Mousepad, xfce4-terminal, the settings control panel, etc ... then I'll have to abandon ship :(
- ufo 10y ago
  Have you ever had a look at htop? I prefer it to both top and the GUI alternatives.
  - byuu 10y ago
    No, but I will check it out, thanks for the recommendation!

mynewtb 10y ago

Hear hear! That would be the end of 10(?) years of xfce for me. Evince for example now seems to use more vertical space for its header but with much less use, thanks to huge, flat, cryptic icons. Luckily there is a light version available that uses gtk 2. I also want to use my scrollwheel to scroll dropdown menus without opening them, or be able to select folders in an 'open' dialog without that stupid thing directly descending into them just because they were highlighted. Hrrrgahnng!

reitanqild 10y ago

Sorry, I know HN doesn't like negativity, but this "change for the sake of it" stuff is getting really old. Agree. I sense I am getting old and grumpy but there is something to learn here: there seems to be an increasing number of people, even in open source, who just want stuff to work. I just want Ubuntu, dropline gnome, updated drivers, backed by a commercial vendor that I can pay a reasonable amount to to make sure they never let designers, ux people, product managers etc experiment with my desktop. Polishing it like Ubuntu originally did was totally ok though. I don't want "spatial navigation" in Gnome. I don't want to have to think application or document" when I hit alt-tab, or having to wait for a (IMO, I know some people love this feature, but bear with my rant here) retarded alt-tab to understand that I want to switch to a document under the app I have switched to, then wait again for it to slide out nicely. No! I want alt tab to switch through my last used windows. If it looks really nice, bonus. I want my drivers to work. Etc. And most of all: I don't want Linux to copy Mac! If I want a Mac I can get my boss to get me one!

digi_owl 10y ago
Bingo. The best "DE" or WM is the one that you virtually forget is there. The sad part is that the DE boys keep thinking that more eyecandy and bling will bring in the users and thus the third party software (apps? bah!) devs. But as JWZ put it, Gnome (and most of the XDG related stuff) is beset with CADT. They fail to see that the one thing that has kept Windows where it is right now is that some company can still run their bespoke business code that was written back in the Windows 3.11 days. Damn it, they can't even manage to do minor updates to glib and related without introducing subtle breakages. And no, Flatpak and related is not a fix. That will just bring the specter of DLL hell to Linux.
- Twirrim 10y ago
  CADT?
  - fnj 10y ago
    Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers

digi_owl 10y ago

They effectively have no choice. Right now there are two major toolkits for DEs, GTK and Qt. And the former is under the control of Gnome, and thus more and more Gnome-isms will make their way into it. So either the already notoriously understaffed XFCE has to fork GTK2, or move to Qt. Effectively we are learning that there is yet another way to hijack freedoms that the FSF do not consider, code churn. Or if one want to be a bit conspiratorial, code churn is what the FSF relies upon to maintain its other freedoms.

byuu 10y ago
I feel like they still have a choice ... at least for now. CSDs are still optional in GTK3. True, they are forced on for the common dialogs, so if you use GTK's file chooser or font picker, then you're going to end up with them. But at least then they're child modal dialogs to a parent application. The Gnome 3 desktop team decided to move every application possible to them, but there's no reason Xfce has to follow suit there. Again, at least for now. It's certainly possible the GTK team will decide to enforce this and remove the option for window manager decorations in a future release. I would really love to see a maintained fork of GTK2, however.
- irq-1 10y ago
  CADT == Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html
zanny 10y ago
It isn't the job of people writing code for free to write anything but what they want to with it. If XFCE wanted to stabilize GTK, they could try to do that with a fork, but there was no bait and switch - it has always been the Gnome ToolKit. You should probably consider that before building desktops based off it that are not Gnome - its future developments are by Gnome, for Gnome. If the fragmented ecosystems on the fringes of GTK - Elementary, XFCE, and Mate - were united, they could have easily forked GTK2 or 3 and maintained their own independent stable toolkit. Hell, the Gnome developers might have appreciated a wider swathe of developers working on it and switched to the fork with a transition to a plugin model for all the Gnome extras than constant churn in the toolkit. Code churn for the sake of it can definitely be a hostile tactic, but GTK churns because Gnome is constantly changing at the whims of its developers in their pursuit of their own ideal desktop. Unless you are paying them for their time or contributing code yourself to their projects, why should you have higher priority over their own desires or those of their immediate users of their whole software suite?

zanny 10y ago

I'm on the opposite side, in that I'm a KDE user / infrequent contributor that has some jealousy for the good use of space Gnome manages to pull off with its decorations. Your only real use for the title bar is a drag zone. Effectively a button to hold down. It doesn't need to occupy the entire horizontal width of your screen to do that. Gnome applications still show the same text information, they just have added buttons there as well to waste less space. You still have ample drag room. If a program doesn't have enough room for buttons or makes their CSD menu buttons obscure that is a design failure distinct from the bar itself. It is just a space saving measure. While screens are bigger, the vertical area is the premium, and wasting a 15px+ of it on an average of 20 characters of text and two buttons should be somewhere to look for improvement in.

notalaser 10y ago
I'm pretty sure that whatever Gnome saved with CSDs has been more than offset by the huge Adwaita widgets. It's bloody hilarious, Firefox's menubar is almost as thick as a GTK2 menubar + a relatively thin decoration just because of the huge space around the text. It's great on all the three tablets that can run Gnome and on the super high-DPI touchscreens that I presume its developers are runings. The rest of us plebs, however, have to stare at the bulkiest widgets since the days when the Industrial GTK theme was a thing. (Certainly, that could be solved with a different them, if a different theme would work for more than three frickin' months...) It also doesn't help that the menubar-toolbar-titlebar mix works great for full-screen windows, and anything but if you're running several non-maximized windows side by side. It's like someone shoved several small iPads on my desktop. It's pretty difficult to even make a decent case that window decorations were broken; I find it much, much harder to make a case that this is the proper way to fix it. Edit: it's also going to be so "fun" to get a desktop where some applications have CSDs and some don't, which is pretty much what we're heading to. Just like back in the days when Xlib and Athena widgets were a thing, I am so totally nostalgic for that.
byuu 10y ago
But it's not saving space. It's literally ten pixels shorter in return for 4-5 major downsides I listed. And if you were to turn off toolbars (which you can't with these title-toolbars), then it's actually a 30 pixel INCREASE in window height.

flushandforget 10y ago

I don't see why we can't semantically define menus and tasks. And have different interfaces that can just plug into these. So if you don't want titles - fine - use a different window manager or style. I can think of many better ways of doing desktop windowing/application behaviour. I have two debian installs. One with old and the other with new debian/xfce/gnome. And although I probably prefer the older debian/xfce combo to alternatives - I can't say I'm particularly smitten.

scrollaway 10y ago

This isn't xfce's fault. GTK2 is discontinued and they don't have a lot of manpower, certainly not enough to port to Qt or fork GTK2. Can I recommend LXQt? I used to work on it and I still use it today. Simple DE that gets out of your way and has no CSDs.

zeveb 10y ago

> have a very easy area to click on to move the window around with. I use a tiling WM, so I don't need to click to move windows:-) Which makes client-side decorations even more evil: I've explicitly decided that I don't want to waste pixels on decorations, and yet programs are now deciding to do so on my behalf anyway. I run emacs without a menubar, toolbar or scrollbar; I run a terminal without any of that cruft. Why would I want all that drek added back? Give me an interface I can use, and a good info system to learn about it; don't give me an interface with training wheels.

thwarted 10y ago

Monitors are bigger than ever today. I promise, people can spare 10 pixels of vertical space so that they can see the name of the application being run (and the name of documents open in said application), and have a very easy area to click on to move the window around with. All gnome3 apps on my current xfce desktop have these huge non-titlebar titlebars with massive amounts of whitespace and big buttons that may or may not be menus, all the while trying to optimize for bogus density; to wit: However, it also features a new (round) style for GtkSwitches, which makes them take up less space. Sweet!

chmln 10y ago

Anecdotally, I find GTK3 title bars much more aesthetically appealing. [1] If you like title bars, why not just openbox --replace? > I promise, people can spare 10 pixels of vertical space so that they can see the name of the application being run (and the name of documents open in said application), and have a very easy area to click on to move the window around with. Well-developed apps still have relevant titles. [1] Others, like gnome-calculator, don't, but that's developer's fault, not GTK3's. I use speedcrunch instead. > They also tend to result in applications that lack traditional menubars, which are very useful for complex programs. Applications are not at all forced to use CSDs. Sublime has a menu bar, and so do VSCode and Atom. > This is going to be horrendous to have to stop using Xfce now, too. > Sorry, I know HN doesn't like negativity, but this "change for the sake of it" stuff is getting really old Ironically, I find people overreact to changes all the time. Remember the reaction of people when Google changed their logo? With GTK2 going obsolete, there isn't really much of a choice for xfce. [1] http://imgur.com/a/wHTq9 http://imgur.com/a/wHTq9

YSFEJ4SWJUVU6 10y ago

>and have a very easy area to click on to move the window around with. If they are using the other gnome-isms, there seems to be quite an ample (grey) area to use to drag drag the window. Quite a bit easier to click than most traditional openbox themes' titles. Personally I have disabled both title bars and borders – I have no use for them. For me they are actually a little too small to be comfortable target zones; I much prefer alt+drag to move (and alt+right-drag to resize, and alt+middle to send to back), whenever I'm in mood to arrange things around. (I actually have one mouse key mapped for alt, but I haven't got around to learn to use it, as I have a hand on keyboard nearly all the time I'm into playing a window manager, and old habits die hard.) P.S. Do not try this if you often have to use other people's computers for non-trivial tasks. The old way feels so clunky to use it hampers you from the actual task at hand.

arximboldi 10y ago

I love CSD... and I use XMonad. I had to figure out how to not render their own shadow, and to disable the "Close" and "Maximize" buttons and edit the Gtk/DecorationLayout property to taste, but I really appreciate the nice simplified menus they bring, and the removal of the bloated menu bars. They are more usable, specially on a small screen when the window is not full screen (on a tile on the side). I also like CSD when I have to use Gnome itself for the bigger dragging area. Traditional menu bars and title bars is poor UX just to enable certain programming decoupled. Now the the abstractions have evolved and we have widget toolkits and the abstraction is provided without compromising the UX. I am sorry you got used to that. You may still use KDE or something else. But some of us really like what GTK and GNOME people are doing. I know the noisiest voices are the critical ones, so here is a reminder: there are plenty of happy users that love the work you are doing. Thanks a lot, I love you for making my computer work better every day, and with Free Software!

byuu 10y ago
I mean, it was great when CSD fans had their Gnome 3, and title/menubar fans had their Xfce. The points I listed aren't just "harumph I don't like change!" complaints, they're actual usability issues for me. I will agree the CSD approach is nicer for tablets and for "less bloat"; but I like the "more power" of a proper menu and toolbar more. It's too bad we can't both be happy. I don't have the resources to develop an entire desktop environment on top of all the projects I'm already working on =(
- unhammer 10y ago
  I use the "hide titlebar when maximised" option in XFCE. I'd actually prefer hiding it when "snapped" to either side too. Thinking about it, since I tend to use Alt+mousedrag to move and alt+f10 to (un)maximise, I don't think there's a point in having a titlebar for me …
- arximboldi 10y ago
  That puts things into perspective... and I agree that in the end, with these unresolvable positions, at least with Free Software we get some degree of freedom of choice :) Now that Xfce is being Gnome-ized, have you considered this: http://lxde.org/ http://lxde.org/? Maybe it suits your taste (lightweight, no CSD).

robotiamsowhat 10y ago

> Sorry, I know HN doesn't like negativity But it should, whenever negativity describes reality... I use FVWM. I've been using it back in 1990ties. It worked. It works. It is invisible - I really don't require pah-nels and blinks, so I reduced it (editing config files in real editor, heh) to just virtual desktop, few useful shortcuts and some icons. For some sensory stuff I use gkrellm - it gives me a clock, too. I was using Afterstep, Gnome (2? and 3?) and KDE. All started to fail after one upgrade or another. Unity is a bit too unbearable to me. Came back to FVWM, undusted old configs, all good now. About two months ago I replaced kdeterm with roxterm, which starts about two or three times faster. I guess I am mostly kde- and gnome- free at the moment. I realize I am in some kind of diminishing minority. As long as I can recompile the source I am not going to complain (too much). Strange times. Who would have imagined I would start thinking of game against open source using older version of it? BTW, if there are any FVWM devs here, thank you a lot. And please, I beg you on my knees - do not improve. But just in case, I will stash a source code somewhere.

shakna 10y ago

XFCE was my goto, as it was minimal, cheap on hardware and one-click install, or thereabouts. I guess I have to go back to a custom setup with openbox.