The future of Xfce

[imschmeg]

I am installing a Fedora 31 VM right now to experiment with the latest Gnome. If anyone with Gnome experience can give me pointers on what to install and try to see if I can get a theme that does brightly colored title/borders on focused windows and not on unfocused ones, I am very willing to give that a try. If I am able to find such a theme, that would address much but not all of my criticism of CSD. What would be left is the fact that client applications have complete control over how they look, including how they obey the theme. With the possibility that an application might disobey (intentionally or accidentally) the focus/unfocus window differences I selected.

I have already tried the High Contrast setting under Accessibility. A big problem with it is that it contrasts foreground vs. background by using black on white, while at the same time removing other colors. This actually reduces my ability to distinguish elements on the screen vs. using multiple bright colors. Also, I find that dark themes (white foreground, black background) have better contrast all around, except for the fact that window shadows don't work well in dark themes, while they do enhance contrast in light themes. BTW - aren't window shadows non-CSD? Because they're drawn on windows other than that belonging to the client (those under the client's window), so isn't the server involved?

[imschmeg]

I found a Gnome CSD theme combo that is pretty good (after installing all that I could find from the Fedora repo). I would still like to modify it - change the border color from white to something else, and change the titlebar color. But I note that there are themes that do this, just no direct way to do it myself. [Note, setting the Image Adjustment to None is how one gets a solid background - but no way to change the color. Fortunately, not a bad sole color choice.]

[LU344928]

From what I understand if I understand correctly is the Whisker menu is built with the Gtk tool kit while LXQt & KDE are both built with the Qt tool kit which that difference doesn't look good for the Whisker menu being added to either LXQt or KDE. From what I understand the Whisker menu would have to be rebuilt using the Qt tool kit in order to work on KDE.

Interesting...

I recently took Devuan for a spin (ascii_2.1) and Xfce displays no Whisker menu but something akin to the LXDE menu. Without rebooting and looking at it again I'd say it resembles LXDE more than LXQt even, not that there's a lot of difference anyway. My guess is Whisker can be enabled somewhere but this default setting did strike me as rather odd .

That means that Devuan doesn't have the Whisker menu installed. You can install the Whisker menu and remove the LXDE style menu from the panel.

Good to know, thanks for that.

[LU344928]

Whisker is a panel plugin, so right click on the panel and go to Panel Preferences. If not there, install it and then add to panel.

It's not there, so I'll have to install it.

The old school menu is the original one that came with XFCE, before Graeme Gott created Whisker.
https://gottcode.org/xfce4-whiskermenu-plugin/

Yes, as seen here, same as on mine:



Thanks for that.

[Stevo]

If thy CSDs offend thee, can't you just cut them off and use Compiz or another window manager in XFCE 4.16?

[Head_on_a_Stick]

To remove client side decorations from all GTK3+ packages simply install the gtk3-nocsd package. Problem solved :-)

EDIT: oops, imschmeg mentioned this on the first page. Sorry...

[imschmeg]

To remove client side decorations from all GTK3+ packages simply install the gtk3-nocsd package. Problem solved :-)

EDIT: oops, imschmeg mentioned this on the first page. Sorry...

Yes, and it works well at the moment, if you don't mind duplication of title and icon. But that might only be because Xfce isn't yet skewed towards CSD. I wonder how it would work in Gnome. I should try it...

Also, for my fellow tin-foil hat wearers: note that the gtk3-nocsd package needs setuid privs.

Here's file-roller with (bottom window) and without CSD:

[Stevo]

To remove client side decorations from all GTK3+ packages simply install the gtk3-nocsd package. Problem solved :-)

EDIT: oops, imschmeg mentioned this on the first page. Sorry...

That's an even better way to chop them off!

What's all the fuss about, then? Sorry, this thread was tl;dr...

[imschmeg]

What's all the fuss about, then?

I suspect that in a CSD WM/DE, it won't be possible to use a hack like gtk3-nocsd. Because the WM/DE won't have a clue how to add its own SSDs once the client signals that it doesn't do CSDs, which is all that gtk3-nocsd does, I think. A clue to this - the gtk3-nocsd isn't installable in Fedora - a very Gnomish distro, so what I take as a model of future CSD-centric desktops like Xfce-to-be. I will try looking in some other Fedora repos, and then try building gtk3-nocsd from its git source (https://github.com/PCMan/gtk3-nocsd). I don't anticipate success.

[dolphin_oracle]

it will probably still have some ability to theme windows that aren't gtk3....Qt, gtk2, heck even electron might still need window decorations.

all xfce is talking about is their own apps, IIRC.