Just a quick reminder to all that that neither #KDE nor #GNOME is better. GNOME is meant to be adaptive and out of your way, whereas #Plasma is meant to be familiar and user centric. Both fill each other's gaps really well.
They both regularly collaborate and push the same standards like Flatpak and Wayland. They don't compete with each other like they used to a long time ago.
https://phabricator.kde.org/T15652
https://phabricator.kde.org/T15633
@TheEvilSkeleton I'm still irked by how #GTK does title bars client-side though. Many environments use server-side title bars which can work differently, and GTK apps tend to look pretty chubby in i3 etc. :-/ Maybe GNOME and KDE don't compete how they used to, but as a power user this always seemed so wrong to me.
(I'm currently a #GNOME user btw. I might go back to sway though someday.)
@gloopsies @TheEvilSkeleton Yeah, CSD does enable a lot of UI potential; putting widgets in the titlebar works great, and I think it so elegant when modern GTK apps change the titlebar depending on context. (1/)
SSD has some nice advantages too; window managers can use it very well. Unity would merge the titlebar with the bar at the top of the screen when maximized and could merge the File-Edit-View-etc bar with the titlebar. SSD is much better at working with poorly/not responsive windows, too. (2/)
From a more philosophical point of view, window decoration is more of a system element – you mainly move, close, resize, maximize, minimize, and many other special things your system does, from it, so shouldn't it be part of the system rather than the applications? The #unixphilosophy comes to mind. (3/)
I wish the free desktop early on had standardized a way (did it?) for exporting the application's menus to the window system, along with (say) information about which menu items should appear as icons on the window decoration, thus gaining many advantages of both SSD and CSD. (4/4)
I think about window decoration quite a bit ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
@golemwire I agree that it's lame, but there's not much they can do about it. CSDs give the opportunity to have multiple elements in the bar. It's why GNOME apps have several buttons at the top bar, like the hamburger menu.
Meanwhile, GIMP has a titlebar+menubar setup, which in my opinion looks awful and takes a lot of space. Steam for example uses CSDs, to merge the menubar and titlebar, which is a much better approach.
Needless to say, you can remove the bar using CSS.
@golemwire @TheEvilSkeleton
I understand where you're coming from, but that's the only way to make title bar actually usable and escape all the menu bars all the KDE apps have. If used as expected, Gnome apps with title bars have more functionality and are more space efficient then KDE alternatives