I am only argumenting against csd. Windicators is a different topic.

“Well to be honest we get request to add arbitrary functionality like a mute button in the decoration about once a month. And we always say no, because it is not possible as there is no common interface. ”

So there is a problem your users (or in this case other developers) want solved… and you keep saying no, and now some proposed solution is a bad idea. And I’m not sure why Canonical meeting their needs is somehow any different than any other company programming/implementing their own solutions, some of which are more broadly adopted and some not. If the idea has merit, it will catch on, otherwise it won’t.

If there are real issues with client side decorations here (and I’m not saying there are not) … Why not just write a new fresh blog post outlining the problem Canonical (or any clientsiders) are trying to solve (try to understand what they are doing) and then propose the solution you think would address it (and it’s short comings) better (window manager/theming manager improvements). I for one like Chrome’s non-standard UI… it doesn’t seem to waste as much screen real-estate as the other 90% of the open source.

Propose solutions, don’t just point out problems. (and don’t push the conversation to Canonical=evil, that helps neither the community nor the conversation)

The point is – you have kept saying “no” when there has been a problem your users want solved… (monthly requests and you consistently ignore it — this consistent pattern in open source is souring)

… and now you are saying no to someone creating a solution.

Why not just write a new fresh blog post outlining the problem Canonical is trying to solve (try to understand what they are doing) and then propose the solution you think would address it (and it’s short comings) better.

To summarize … open source has far too much “no this won’t work” instead of I see what you want to do, here is a different solution that I perceive addresses everyone’s concerns. (and just pushing the conversation towards if canonical does anything, it sucks, is not helpful to anyone’s community)

Developers want flexibility, do you want KDE to be “the less flexible toolkit”?

I’m doing free software because I want to provide the best possible user experience to the user. Client-side-window-decorations will destroy the user experience, because it gives devs the flexiblity to do stupid things. Yes in that regard I do not want to have a flexible toolkit.

Old apps will work like they did, check

And that’s exactly the issue! We have then two different sets of window control without any consistency. That’s exactly the reason why I wrote the blog post. It would destroy something that works (all windows have the same decoration) with something that is completely broken (different controls, different user actions, etc. etc.).

If you have any reasons why my position is wrong, please share it with the community. Up to now I can only see the points mentioned on the GNOME Wiki and they are not valid.