Comment by zanny | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zanny | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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.

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.

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