Xfce Classic, a fork of Xfce but without the client-side window decoration

Shawn Anastasio a free software enthusiast, which at some point tried to develop its own operating system "ShawnOS" recently announced the birth of the Xfce Classic project.

In which intends to develop the components user environment Xfce, working without the use of window decoration on the client side (CSD), in which the window title and frame are not drawn by the window manager, but by the application itself.

This became possible, by analogy with GNOME, to place menus, buttons, and other interface elements in the window title. In addition, the new interface rendering engine is built into the libxfce4ui library, which led to the automatic use of CSD for almost all dialog boxes, without the need for code changes in existing projects.

The transition to CSD encountered opponents which believe CSD support should be optional and the user should be able to continue using the classic window titles.

Among the cons of using CSD, It is mentioned too large a window title area, the lack of need to transfer application elements to the window title, the ineffectiveness of Xfwm4 design themes and inconsistency in window decoration of Xfce / GNOME applications and programs that do not use CSD.

It should be noted that one of the reasons for the rejection of the GNOME interface by some users is the use of CSD.

As no attempts were made in 5 months to provide support to disable CSD, Shawn Anastasio decided to take matters into his own hands and created a fork of the libxfce4ui library, in which it cleaned up the link to CSD and returned the old server-side decoration mode (window manager).

To ensure compatibility with the applications that They use the new API libxfce4ui and preserve ABI.

Special bindings have been prepared that translate specific CSD methods from the XfceTitledDialog class to GtkDialog class calls. As a result, it is possible to remove Xfce applications from CSD by replacing the libxfce4ui library, without changing the code of the applications themselves.

In addition, a fork of the xfce4-panel has formed, which includes changes to return classic behavior. An overlay has been prepared for Gentoo users to install libxfce4ui-nocsd.

For Xubuntu / Ubuntu users, a PPA repository has been prepared with ready-to-use packages.

The reasons for creating the fork, Sean Anastasia, explained that:

You have been using Xfce for many years and you like the interface of this environment. After making the decision to change the interface that you disagreed with, and the lack of attempts to provide an option to return the old behavior, it was decided to resolve your issue independently and share the solution with other people who share your point of view.

Of the problems when using Xfce Classic, duplicate printing is noted of headers due to the display of duplicate information in the header and in the application window.

This feature is consistent with the behavior of Xfce 4.12 and 4.14, and is not related to CSD.

In some applications, said duplication seems normal (for example in xfce4-Screenshooter), but in others it is clearly inappropriate. To solve this problem, adding an environment variable that regulates the rendering of XfceHeading is not ruled out.

The CSD supporters position comes down to the ability to use wasted window title space to place menus, panel buttons, and other important interface elements.

Window decoration for all applications is much easier to bring to a unified style in the classic representation of the window service areas on the server side.

In the case of CSD, it is necessary to adapt the application interface to each graphical environment separately and it is difficult enough to ensure that the application does not look strange in different user environments.

Source: https://linuxreviews.org


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  1.   01101001b said

    Applause. Honest applause.
    The choice to choose should be a distinguishing feature of Linux. And it was.
    Now if you want to continue choosing, you have to step aside like Shawn Anastasio did (luckily for him, he can).
    Incredible, xo they do not leave you another.
    And those who refuse to make any change optional, and on the contrary, they impose it on those of us who do not develop, they are the first to tear their clothes due to the fragmentation of Linux (pointing a finger, of course, at those who make forks) cdo them themselves are the only culprits.