client side decorations

[maltee at lavabit.com]

sorry for forgetting the subject, I had one first but then kmail2 beta failed
to send the mail and I forgot about the subject when using webmail

On Thu, 5 May 2011 05:18:23 PM Bill Spitzak wrote:
> The claim that users are confused by mismatched window borders is not
> backed by evidence either. It is pretty clear users can operate their
> media players and games despite them bypassing the system window
> borders, and are not having trouble with Chromium either.

This is not exactly true. As long as applications keep the convention of
minimize-maximize-close in the right upper corner, there are usually no major
issues. I'm using chromium for it's good html5 support, but I really don't
like the client-side decorations and there are thousands out there,
complainging about them, too.
- I don't use a "show desktop" button. When I want to go to my desktop, I
minimize all maximized windows first, clicking the area of the minimize
button.
Chromium's minimize button is in a slightly different place, consequently,
I'm
missing it.
- Chromium resizes maximized windows when clicking the titlebar. KWin resizes
maximized windows, when dragging the titlebar down. This is a really annoying
inconsistency I needed to get used to. Especially in combination with the
problem described above - it can happen that you click an empty space instead
of a button.

When you like your titlebar buttons on the left, that's when things really
start to get ugly...

And this is just with two different decorations, if wayland provides no
way to
get uniform decorations, it's going to look a lot worse.

As for the case of games an media players, I think you are referring to
Windows. Windows has a default decoration who's behaviour the vast
majority of
applications with custom decorations copy.

A desktop is likely to be running GTK+ and Qt applications. X applications
will be common, at least in the beginning. Some people use wine, which will
eventually be ported to Wayland, too. Let's say, you are playing around with
3D design using blender. And there is this game, you like to play, that isn't
using full screen. That makes six different decorations (five if there is
a way
to make GTK+ und Qt look alike), that won't possibly agree on common sizes
and
positions for borders and buttons, context menus, areas to grab for resizing
and what to do when clicking on the titlebar.
So please, for usabilities sake, provide a way (possibly outside of wayland,
but inside would be better to make it a commonly accepted standard) to use a
highly themable, default decoration with themes being able to use any toolkit
so that a toolkit (or third party) can provide a theme that matches it's
default decoration. This would result in two different decorations for most
desktops (one if there is a way to make Qt and GTK+ look alike).

Malte E.