If you have updated to the recently released GNOME development version, you may have noticed that some window decorations look slightly different. Of course it is quite normal for the theme to evolve with the rest of GNOME, but in this case the visual changes are actually the result of some bigger changes under the hood which deserve some more explanation.
It is well-known that GTK+ gained support for client-side decorations a while ago – after all, most GNOME applications were quick in adopting custom titlebars, which have become one of the most distinguished patterns of GNOME 3 applications. However it is less well-known that client-side decorations may also be used for windows with no custom decorations, namely when using GDK’s wayland backend.
Why is this interesting?
It isn’t really. Whether the non-customized decorations are provided by the window manager or by the toolkit is transparent to the application, and there is no reason why users should care either.
Except that on GNOME 3.14, decorations looked like this:
Client- and server-side decorations in GNOME 3.14
Ouch. There is an all-too-obvious visual difference for something that should be an implementation detail, and the possibility of users encountering both styles in the same session doesn’t help either.
Of course it would be easy to just blame the GNOME design team – after all, while the metacity-1 theme format used by the window manager is hugely different from CSS as used by GTK+, it would still be possible to create a more consistent look from the lowest common denominator of both formats. But if the goal is to have both types of decorations match as closely as possible, using different themes and expecting an already overworked team to put additional work into papering over the differences is hardly the best solution.
Did I mention that the metacity-1 format is also plainly unpleasant?
So from GNOME 3.16 on, the window manager theme will be gone. Instead, window manager decorations will use the same theme information GTK+ uses for its client-side decorations. As you would expect, both types of decorations now look much more consistent as a result:
Client- and server-side decorations in GNOME 3.15
Besides the improved consistency, using a single theme has some additional benefits:
- users who use a different GTK+ theme no longer need to hunt for a matching window manager theme
- one less (tweak) option that can be a bit hard to explain (“Window decorations. Except not all of them. Oh, and some of the colors may actually come from another theme.”)
- the GNOME design team no longer needs to maintain two different but matching themes
- sharing a theme also means sharing code, we were able to remove a bit over 10,000 lines from mutter
Now it would be dishonest to pretend that there aren’t any downsides – the metacity theme has been around a decade longer than GTK+’s client-side decorations, so it is hardly surprising that there is a greater selection of the former around. And support for window-decorations in 3rd party GTK+ themes is often dodgy, if it exists at all. However with more and more GNOME applications using custom titlebars and the upcoming transition to wayland, it does not get easier to ignore GTK+’s decorations – some broken decorations may be better than all broken decorations, but the correct way forward is of course to fix GTK+ themes. It’s CSS after all, which is much more familiar to most artists than the old format, and quite a bit nicer as well, so here’s hoping that the situation will improve rapidly.
In the meantime, let those of us who stay with the default theme enjoy some nicer-looking decorations for all windows …
