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Comment by darren0 | Hacker News Reader

The transition to Wayland also seems to correlate with the adoption of client side decorations (CSD). This "modern" approach destroys the traditional UX of XFCE as seen by recent changes in the settings manager. I fear for the future of XFCE. The advantage of XFCE for me has always been that it's a stable implementation of a traditional Win98/XP UX. I hope they don't adopt more Gnome3 patterns.

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> The transition to Wayland also seems to correlate with the adoption of client side decorations (CSD)

Not really. The GNOME/GTK folks were already on the CSD bandwagon well before Wayland. Wayland compositors are free to draw their own decorations (and xfwm4 will indeed continue doing that once it's a Wayland compositor), and one of the actually neat things about Wayland is that there is a protocol that allows the compositor to tell applications not to draw their own decorations. (Whereas on X11 an app can tell the WM it will draw CSDs and the WM can't do a thing about it.)

Certainly GNOME has gone all the way to CSDs (IIRC if an app on GNOME doesn't draw CSDs, they get no decorations at all), but that has nothing to do with Wayland.

What has this to do with wayland or XFCE? The only major DE that is using client side decorations is gnome. This has been true since 2018:

> I heard that GNOME is currently trying to lobby for all applications implementing CSD. One of the arguments seems to be that CSD is a must on Wayland. That’s of course not the case. Nothing in Wayland enforces CSD. Wayland itself is as ignorant about this as X11. [...] In fact we created a protocol (supported by GTK) that allows to negotiate with the Wayland compositor whether to use CSD or SSD.

From https://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2018/01/server-side-d...

Wayland is agnostic, and it's up to the compositor and application to decide what to do while operating under wayland.

CSD has nothing to do with UX. CSD just means the application draws the window controls and borders.

The application drawing window controls and borders becomes a UX problem when it doesn't do it right.

The application having the ability to change how the title bar works is an anti-feature for me.

On Wayland, the compositor can either let windows draw their own borders, or it can disallow it. On X11, if a window want's to draw its own decorations... it will just do it, and you won't be able to do anything about it.

Pretty much every single Wayland compositor follows this except for GNOME, who refuse to do so. It causes problems with windows like Davinci Resolve who don't draw their own decos. This leaves some windows without any controls at all lol. But this is a tangent and purely a GNOME problem.

> This leaves some windows without any controls at all lol.

Don't all WMs have shortcut keys anyway?

I mean yeah... But most people are going to have trouble with that, especially being unable to resize or move the window. I even saw a tech Youtuber try out gnome and they were baffled on why they couldn't move or resize davinci resolve whatsoever. Its almost shameful how negligent and hard-headed gnome is being.

They say they want software freedom, but in reality you have to use their software their way or you will suffer.

I gave up when even normal settings were hidden and I had to use Gnome Tweak Tool, but when I upgraded, I found all my changes had been wiped.

> CSD has nothing to do with UX.

Sure it does. Allowing windows to draw their own decorations, often in different ways and with different styles and themes, and not respecting the settings in xfwm4 as to what window-control buttons should be drawn (and where)... that's a huge UX issue.

Depends on your definition of CSD.

The process drawing it's own decorations? Technical decision that both Windows (tad complicated) and macOS already do, nothing to do with UX. There's nothing stopping this model from having the uniformity of SSD (as like on macOS), but it does on Linux due to multiple toolkits which don't all agree with eachother.

Combined headerbars? UX decision.

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