It’s now over a year since the Gnome project launched the CSD initiative with the idea that this would be the next best thing for the Linux desktop with the claim that it would make the desktop look more unified and you would use up unused space on the screen.
The first claim that the desktop look would be more unified is just a lie, as the window decoration is now in the hands of the application developers and we already know that UI design among Gnome applications do not look the same, so title bars that the application developer can design will not look the same either.
Here we see two applications titlebars, both using CSD, both have different color, they have different icons for the same thing and the first one has so little space to actually grab the title bar to move it around that it starts to be impossible (the are would be smaller if you don’t have fullscreen size window). You also see that the titlebars are of different height, Gnome do not properly honor DPI which makes the titlebar to be higher than what it needs to be.
The other problem is that the user itself have no way to customize the titlebar, for old school users the right side close screen button should be on the left side of the titlebar, this not anymore possible and no way to add a “on all desktops” button.
On my nVidia based setup, the DPI has been manually set to work with the old screen, this works fine in Qt based desktop environments as KDE, Lumine, and LXQT, but not on GTK based as Gnome* and Deepin (I know it’s mainly Qt, but uses GTK for CSD). GTK (as rest of Gnome*) do not honor user set system values, it’s a bit of their whole philosophy to not trust end users and their opinions (this was clearly seen during the Gnome2 project). This ignoring system settings makes the titlebar to be out of proportion compared to Qt applications, which can make the titlebar to take a lot more space than a traditional server side titlebar.
In the end, users should be in charge of look and feel, this applies to the titlebar too, or else we could just use a second grade operating system as microsoft windows where a type of CSD has been used for years and almost no application has the same look and feel as another for we developers are bad on making GUI decisions.
Yeah you’re absolutely right… I feel GNOME is giving less and less freedom do its users over the years.
Side note: In ElementaryOS, there are some UI design guidelines for developers in order to keep the applications visually consistent https://elementary.io/docs/human-interface-guidelines#what-design-is-not
There is a similar document for Gnome project too https://developer.gnome.org/hig/stable/
but the issue is that the decisions are made top down, not the other way around, with stupid decisions from RedHat.
The problem with these kind of documents are that developers will have free hands to do what ever design they want, there is no overseeing body who sees to that everyone follows the rules and even in closed source companies where you think they would be able to follow simple guidelines, they fail, just look at how messy the GUI is in microsofts own products.