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Comment by PeCaN | Hacker News Reader

Ever used a tiling window manager? Client-side decorations are quite annoying to deal with, since otherwise I don't have title bars.

Also the Gtk developers are (probably) not evil, they just happen to also be the Gnome devs and have made some choices that are a little questionable to the rest of us.

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Wait ... wait ...

I used ratpoison/ion3 from about 2000 through 2007 and then switched to OSX. So I never saw this ...

You're saying that in modern Xwin/Xorg, the actual applications have title bars and so on ... such that if I were using RP/ion I would see the titlebars ?

Is that what you're saying ?

That is what client side decorations are. The application draws in their own windows their own title bars / frames / min / max / close buttons and that will happen everywhere.

Go open the Steam client on Linux, it is using CSD so it always has min / max / close in the top right.

And when things lock up, you can't move or close anything because the buttons are unresponsive?

That's a sort-of-misconception, I think. AFAIK the client has to "advertise" the general location of the standard buttons, so if it's generally well-behaved, but just randomly locks up (via bug, not malicious intent), then you should generally still be able to close it.

(That's my understanding from the pro-CSD crowd, I'm personally pro-SSD, so I may have misunderstood unintentionally, but I think I'm being as charitable as possible in the above interpretation/description.)

Yes. Just tested starting a gedit and sending it Ctrl-Z in the terminal. Completely unresponsive window, can't drag titlebar, can't click on X. But that's what users want, right? Feature parity with Mac OS X and Windows.

Yep, Steam frequently locks up like that for me. It hasn't crashed, but it takes some jiggling to be able to click on any menu items within Steam again.

Yes, and no.

You'll see the titlebars anyway because they contain worthwhile controls now. You know, like with Chrome putting the close buttons on the tab bar. Evince (a document viewer) has the page number, back-next, find, annotate button, zoom controls, options dropdown and a lil' more on there, for example.

The other thing is that the control buttons you won't want are opt-out:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GTK%2B#Client-side_deco...

Good thing they're optional, then.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GTK%2B#Client-side_deco...

By diving the theme scripts and dumping a crapload of settings in there, lovely...

You only need the one line in ~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini. The other stuff is for, well, theme stuff.

At least in this version of GTK. Disabling client-side decorations seems to be frowned upon, so expect this to break in the next Gnome release.

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