I think that we got a little bit sidetracked. "I want my users to be able to be able to select what borders to have" -> "the user can choose to use GTK or Qt apps" -> "it encourages duplicate work for minor differences" -> "fragmentation isn't exactly new"
Fragmentation might not be new but I would really rather not re-write my UI in another toolkit just to offer a second border option.
> that will be broken if you use it outside the recommended environment as the HIGs won't match
Depends on your definition of broken I guess. If you consider the user unbinding C-q from "quit" as broken because "the HIGs won't match" then I would have to say that I disagree. If the user wants to make "breaking" chances to my applications they should be free, especially since I don't believe that any big issues will be caused. If some minor issues are caused at certain configurations then that's fine, after all the user could revert to the default config if they encounter an issue that breaks their use-case or makes the interaction feel inferior to the default one.
> Well, no it doesn't
Thank you for the correction, I take it back. I guess if I go with gtk4 I would have to use a mix of gtk4+libdecor in order to have "native" borders in all WMs, is that correct?
> Most older apps aren't like this.
What do you mean by "older apps"? Motif-era, gtk2-era, or gtk3-era? I do not think that I had a big issue with any of them but I could be forgetting something.
> GNOME is not a tiling WM
Well, yeah, because GNOME is not a WM :p
By "going out of their way" I meant specifically the decision to implement CSD.
In general I think that GNOME should be able to do whatever it wants, I just wish that they would play better with the other players (and well, the users).
> The way you're phrasing is confusing. To me it's like saying "every vehicle has four wheels except bicycles". Well I guess you could say that for some subset of vehicles, but I don't understand what the distinction here is supposed to be, or why that even matters.
More like "all (relevant) C compilers except MSVC support C99 VLAs", or "all mobile phones in the EU except apple's use a standard charger". The point is that while xdg-decoration might be an optional extension in reality it is pretty much standard except in two WMs that require special handling.