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This week in KDE: #Plasma6 is not only gearing up for a big technological shift, but is also adding cool new features and improving the user experience
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This week in KDE: #Plasma6 is not only gearing up for a big technological shift, but is also adding cool new features and improving the user experience
Look forward to sound themes! Snappier responses! Prettier widgets! More awesome things!
https://pointieststick.com/2023/07/28/this-week-in-kde-sounds-like-plasma-6/
@ChristianWS How would that ruin Plasma?
We are talking about CSD, are we not?
There are quite a number of DEs using CSD, and a couple of them even feature a more "traditional" layout with a button panel and left side app menu.
While some folks like it, at this point one of the defining features of Plasma is the fact that it stands out by not using Server Side Decorations, or GTK for that matter.
~~Besides, CSD is ugly~~
@ChristianWS CSD can just look like the normal Window+Decoration.
My point is however that KDE can use it to at least put something to the CSD, like the app-menu if visible. Different apps would find different purposes for it and there shouldnt be a hard requirement for it, but optional feature to use for the devs.
CSD is just a ugly as you make it to be. In my opinion SSD is nowadays very out of place, vertical wasted space.
Not really following what you mean.
The moment you allow CSD, apps can and will put whatever they want on there, leading to wildly inconsistency in the number of things there.
CSD will always looks weird cause it takes too much vertical space. It will never look as good as a normal Title Bar, which can be controlled by the server.
You also lose draggable space, as now buttons are taking space.
@ChristianWS It's not the app that does this. Developer do this, they do this because they think it's good. The KDE does have a nice visual design group (I was once part of it, So I know :P). It would be possible to define a design guide to follow so apps won't look out of place, while still are able to make use of CSD.
Plasma doesnt need to look like GNOMEs implementation of a CSD. The visuals are a completely different thing. The technology is the important part at first.
Design follows technology and vice-versa. Once you allow devs to use CSD they can and will use that space to put buttons on it, and that inevitably leads to inconsistency between apps, because they will never share the same amount of buttons or be divided by the same amount of panels.
CSD is a Pandora's box that is best left unopened.
@ChristianWS "Design follows technology and vice-versa." Thats a hard one. Yes, and also no. Things dont need to be the same to behave the same. Take Firefox and Chrome. They do not look the same, they still behave the same. They share a common design guideline. You need to go to the settings to see the parts that differ.
If KDE provides a good design guideline devs would follow them, because it's easier and faster to have working patterns instead of putting work into it yourself.
It doesn't work for CSD cause you either have a very strict guideline to prevent inconsistency, limiting the number and location of buttons. At which point it is so limiting that Developers need add another bar to hold whatever they can't put on the header bar, rendering the CSD implementation moot.
Or you do like GTK and allow inconsistency. You can't win with CSD.
And that is not even mentioning if CSD is even a good idea in the first place. Some users deliberately went with Plasma due to the lack of CSD in the first place, those would migrate to LXQT or XFCE.
@ChristianWS I think your idea of inconsistency differs from mine. Havin buttons on different locations in a headerbar doesnt have to be inconsistent across apps. Different layouts can be consistent.
BUT I dont talk about header bars. I do talk about CSD only and they can be whatever a guideline makes them to be. All Qt apps already have a CSD, but they suck and it would be nice if app devs would be allowed to make use of them on the KDE side if they decide that it benefits the app.
I'm genuinely curious: What exactly do you have in mind with CSDs without the use of a Header Bar?
CSD and Header Bars are practically synonymous, and I don't think I've seen, or even heard, about CSDs without the context of a header bar
@ChristianWS depending on the application different things. Like I said before, the visuals, the design is not what I care about right now. It's the option to have another talk about that topic in general.
Last time, there was no focus on wayland and there wasnt much experience with CSD in general. There also was the proposal of DWD¹ as option, that never came up.
1: https://kver.wordpress.com/2014/10/25/presenting-dwd-a-candidate-for-kde-window-decorations/
...how do you hope to have a discussion about a design feature without discussing the visuals? The entire CSD vs SSD debate is one of UX/UI Design
You still haven't provided an example of CSD without a Header bar. I'm familiar with the DWD proposal, the technology used might be different, but the end result is still a Header Bar in all but name.
@ChristianWS Huh? I have shown 3 pictures of a CSD without header bar (Nextcloud, Blender, Gimp).
CSD vs SSD is about control and integration. CSD can just look like SSD, thats why I do not care about the visuals.
...where? No seriously, I don't see any picture, there's only the link to DWD. I don't use Nextcloud, but both Blender and Gimp use SSD on my system.
And I'm quite confused by the idea of CSD looking like SSD. I know it can, however, I don't see how that isn't an argument for continuing to use SSD. What is the benefit of changing from SSD to CSD if the end result is to look like SSD, but have all the issues that come from using CSD?
@ChristianWS In this post: https://mstdn.social/@fabiscafe/110803301092316008
XDG-decoration is not a core part of Wayland. So there is no guarantee that the compositor your user runs does support this. So the general improvement would at least be that you dont have to test both.¹
On top of that the app could have more control over it's decoration, for accessiblity stuff. Like going in a OLED/e-Ink/High-contrast mode.
1: https://wayland.app/protocols/xdg-decoration-unstable-v1
...you sure the pictures aren't an argument against CSD? The wallpaper on those pics looks the same, so I'm assuming they are on the same system, but they are inconsistent with one another. Meanwhile Blender and Gimp on my system look right at home.
...ain't that supposed to be part of the window manager tho?
@ChristianWS There are 2 consistencies: Consistent to the system and consistent to the application.
I prefer consistent to the application, because I think the application developer is more capable to kow what the app needs then the general window decoration provider is.
🧵️…
...yes, I agree with that, and that is why SSDs are superior. They allow the app developer to do whatever they want inside the app, while also making sure the window frame is consistent with the rest of the system.
It's like a gallery wall in a home, you can mix photos and paintings with varying styles, and they would still look like they fit together if you use the same frame style on them.
@ChristianWS What if the application developer needs more? Hide the close button, unallow to minimize, display an exit button on fullscreen, Transform the whole app design on the fly or just to have a dark design for the application including decoration (This one hurts my eyes extremly for krita on windows 🥲️). SSD is just not flexible and might not even provide the feature set required by an application.
Thats why it would be nice to give them the option to implement it directly.
I mean, disabling the close button is probably on the top 10 ways to give a PC user a panic attack. And there was a time when games had an exit button on fullscreen.
Also, what the hell, if Undertale can jumpscare the player while still using Windows titlebar on display then SSDs are not an issue.