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 “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?
> 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?
Because you can implement things like these (open this comment in Mastodon if in Lemmy you don’t see the attached images) and I don’t see what the issues are:
@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