 is not only gearing up for a big technological shift, but is also adding cool new features and improving the user experience](https://cdn.masto.host/floss/media_attachments/files/110/796/930/641/437/135/original/e69c4c710545b583.png){kind=link}
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 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/
As shown by Latte Dock’s Window Buttons widget, apps can display window controls that follow the window decoration theme.
And in GNOME apps follow some guidelines that include how header bars should be.
KDE apps do the same for everything but the titlebar that is drawn by KWin. If they are consistent with their content, I don’t see why they wouldn’t stay consistent when making the titlebar/window controls their own responsability.
I don’t understand the Latte Dock argument.
And I was having GNOME in mind as the example of the inconsistency natural to CSD.
Latte Dock:
https://psifidotos.blogspot.com/2020/04/article-rounded-plasma-and-qt-csds.html
GNOME official apps the the “Circle” ones look very consistent to me:
https://circle.gnome.org/
I don’t understand the Latte Dock argument because it is only relevant to the window buttons, there is still the rest of the header bar.
I picked some random apps in the “Circle” and all of them are inconsistent, I don’t understand. They have inconsistent number of buttons, placement, and organization
These are guidelines for header bars:
https://developer.gnome.org/hig/patterns/containers/header-bars.html
Yes different applications feature a different set of controls but in a consistent way, just like the rest of the UI. I don’t understand why you expect a portion of UI to be exactly the same for all apps.
It is definitely not consistent, even when they have the same buttons.
AudioSharing has the hamburguer button on the left side, while Decoder has on the right side.
Citations has the header bar split to follow the panels inside the app, where Boatswain is divided into two panels, but the header bar isn’t.
And that is not to mention how some apps style the header bar itself, but I’m going to assume it is a problem with the screenshots not being taken on the same system.
I don’t want to be mean to GNOME, as KDE is also guilty of this and both are built by maintainers, but the GNOME Guidelines is bare bones. It offers too little information on the best practices and what should be done. It is a totally not-fair comparison, but compare it with the Top App Bar Component guideline of Material Design, and yet it is still not enough as it overlooks some common edge cases.
About the hamburger menu: are those screenshots by you or by diffetent people from the Web? Because the position of the menu is a user setting:
https://docs.gtk.org/gtk4/property.Settings.gtk-decoration-layout.html
About the split of header bar: it depends if an app has a header bar that refers to both the views below or the app is splitted in two with two header bars that refer to the respective views.