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Comment by lkiux | Hacker News Reader

Client-side decorations, visible in the screenshot, are a true PITA. It's stupid that each widget set has to replicate this behavior. It results in visual differences, and it's doubly stupid that this is touted as an "advancement" just for the rate case that you want to override the title bar.

You could have done the inverse, as currently done with X11 (server-side decoration by default, but overridable).

This incurs in stupid behavior for all tiling window managers in wayland, as they cannot enforce the client to remove the title bar. For a tiling window manager user, this a significant downgrade in wayland. The WM protocol in X11 is one of the few areas that let X11 innovate a lot compared to all other desktops. The number of (wonderfully) different window managers is proof. Server-side decorations, in particular, should have been a no-brainer!

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FWIW, we use server-side decos in the Wayland implementation of KDE Plasma and KDE/Qt apps, for these reasons and many others. If anyone says it can't be done, feel free to point them our way :-)

How?

> It results in visual differences, and it's doubly stupid that this is touted as an "advancement" just for the rate case that you want to override the title bar.

Which is a stupid idea in and of itself. It means there's no trusted path to the window manager that programs can't spoof.

Another unsolved feature in Wayland is ssh-agent/gpg-agent support. I haven't found a way to make it work yet. It's either multiple agents or many fresh agents running.

Why does Wayland need any sort of ssh-agent/gpg-agent support? I can't think of any reason for Wayland to have anything to do with their functionality, but I'm not at all familiar with Wayland.

The way this works in X11 is that you usually start your X11 env such that the environment variable pointing to the agent (which got started) is shared and the agent is accessible by applications. That way running ssh or gpg in any xterm will just work. This is not possible at the moment in Wayland. Think of it like OSX's keychain.

Why shouldn't it be possible? You can just setup your agent before you start Wayland, it inherits the environment.

Huh, I'll try that. I never thought of it like that because due to conventions the agent was always part of xinit. Might need to come up with a different way of running wayland compositors to keep the actually TTY shell free of the agent.

Yeah, they really are a pain, hopefully we can transfer to another terminal emulator for it (I'm one of the main developers).

Also as an aside, that's actually a linked video, github just does a REALLY bad job of showing that off. I'm going to have to make that more clear.

> This incurs in stupid behavior for all tiling window managers in wayland, as they cannot enforce the client to remove the title bar

But neither can X11 WMs really enforce in any way client to remove title bar. Of course the WM might refuse to render its own decorations, but it can't really deny the client of rendering whatever it wants.

True, but in practice nobody really has a reason to override the title bar, because it forces you to implement dragging and resizing behavior as well. People that do this know the pain. It also works poorly unless you do it at a pretty low level (within the toolkit itself).

The only program(s) that do this are chromium and firefox in my machine, and both can disable this because it doesn't look native.

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