LFCS 2012: X and Wayland [LWN.net]

LFCS 2012: X and Wayland

Posted Apr 13, 2012 11:10 UTC (Fri) by mgraesslin (subscriber, #78959)
In reply to: LFCS 2012: X and Wayland by dlang
Parent article: LFCS 2012: X and Wayland

There will never be Client Side Window Decorations in KDE Plasma. In fact the current state of Wayland support in KWin requires server side Window Decoration for Wayland Clients.

We will most likely go for an approach were all Wayland Clients will be forced into server side decorations no matter whether they use Client Side Decorations or not. We have to do that as the differentiation between our Workspaces (Desktop, Netbook, Tablet) is from Window Manager perspective mostly in the decorations (Desktop always decoration, Netbook decorated except maximized windows, Tablet undecorated). I don't expect that application developers will care about such differentiation and we need to have the possibility to experiment in that area. We would limit ourselves if we would allow Client Side Decorations.

I have even considered to enforce server side decorations on X11 but that's difficult due to backwards compatibility.

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LFCS 2012: X and Wayland

Posted Apr 13, 2012 12:07 UTC (Fri) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]

> I don't expect that application developers will care about such differentiation and we need to have the possibility to experiment in that area.
Well, if applications were to draw the decorations themselves, they're going to use a library to do it anyway. This kind of issues should be handled transparently to application developers in that library.

LFCS 2012: X and Wayland

Posted Apr 13, 2012 13:03 UTC (Fri) by mgraesslin (subscriber, #78959) [Link]

and how should such a library function? We need one to do rendering with GTK, one for rendering with Qt, one for rendering OpenOffice/LibreOffice. The same then for each of the different shells oh and people might want to change the window decorations. Yes some flexibility known from KDE Plasma which our users don't want to go away.

Sorry a library just does not fit it. Especially not if we want to be able to experiment from one release to the other.

We just should not try to fix what is not broken and keep server side decorations. Please read http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2010/05/open-letter... why client side decorations are a very bad idea. And no, most of the issues mentioned in that blog post will not go away with Wayland. Some issues might be fixable by adding some glue there and some hacks there, but then we are again fixing what is not broken :-)