[vetinari]

They did that for a reason. Rendering decorations server-side is a really bad idea. Just because X11 did it is not a reason to repeat the mistake.

If other compositors want to do it, they have their optional extension for that. Eventually, they will find out why they shouldn't do it. With mandatory extension, there would be no way back, with optional, there is.

[rcxdude]

I've yet to see a good argument for why it's a bad idea. To me client-side decorations are mostly yet another way that the desktop is turning into a cluttered mess of different UI styles.

[vetinari]

Basically two:

1) Synchronization: when you are rendering decorations in a different process that the window content, you never get frame perfect. You can't synchronize both processes for each frame.

2) When painting using two processes, you need two surfaces. You just doubled your VRAM usage and the amount of blitting you need to do.

Now, decorations are not only the window chrome itself, but parts of them are font rendering (Qt renders fonts a little bit differently than Gtk, you can see the differences) and popup menus (when right clicking on the window chrome). The menus are a difficult thing; they basically pull in the entire respective UI framework (theming, sizing, font rendering, ...). So you do not really have a choice of unified look with server-side decorations; you have choice with cluttered mess between apps using different frameworks, or cluttered mess inside apps using different framework than the one used to render decorations.

So, how the other operating systems do it? They won't allow you to connect directly to compositor in the first place. You _must_ use the platform library, be it Cocoa or Win32 in order to be able to get a surface that gets displayed. And since you are already linking these libraries, they will paint the decorations for you -- unless you override it. All that is client-side, in the address space of your application, in your message queue.

Now, Windows does have a server-side fallback, when you app is not processing the message queue. Then it will paint the system decorations, but since your app is not responding, any synchronization is passe anyway.

So how to solve this in Linux? You will have as many looks, as many apps decide that they do not want to play ball, that they are a special snowflake, that need to avoid the "bloat" of frameworks. The cluttered mess of different UI styles and the permanently broken state of everything is a price you are paying for them to be able to do exactly that.

Otherwise, you would be able to reduce the looks to two (Qt and Gtk). When things would go very well, Qt could do what it does on other platforms and use Gtk+ look. That's about the only way to get unified look.

[thayne]

I'm not opposed to having mechanism to opt in to client side decoration, but making it mandatory is problematic for several reasons:

1. Different apps will draw decorations differently, leading to a lot inconsistency. 2. It means apps designed for other environments that don't draw their own decorations won't have any decorations. 3. If your client doesn't use one of the big all encomposing gui toolkits (not every app needs that), then it has to implement the decorations itself, which is non-trivial to do correctly (I know because I have worked on it for such an app). 4. You can't reliably configure the appearance and behavior of the decorations in a central place for all applications.

Fuethermore, if clients always draw their own decorations, then if you use a tiling wm and don't want decorations at all, you are stuck with them.

[vetinari]

1) They will anyway, see below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39728575

2) Only if they use server-side decorations only. In Wayland, client-side is mandatory and server-side optional. So if they do not have decorations, they are broken.

3) You client should use one of the big frameworks. On other operating systems, they are mandatory anyway. Only Linux allows your client connecting to compositor directly. Use that power responsibly. Frameworks bring lot of stuff implemented for you. If you reject that, it is up to you to implement that yourself.

4) You can't even with server-side decorations either.

Yes, with tiling, you get them. However, many apps have toolbar there, so you need it anyway.

[silon42]

Even on a non-tiling WM, I'll rather have double decorations for GNOME apps than suffer the client side decorations.

[noisem4ker]

> Rendering decorations server-side is a really bad idea.

Why?

[vetinari]

See the answer above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39728575