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So, why should GNOME support server side decorations?
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this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2026
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Yes. While CSD are obviously better - because they enable the titlebar to contain useful things instead of being a gigantic waste of pixels - SSD also obviously need to be supported.
Which can also be achieved with locally integrated menus on SSDs. I use this for example. It may not give you the same flexibility as CSDs, but it does reduce the aspect of wasted space.
Now this is exactly the kinda things I want apps to do with the title bar !
I still think more apps would benefit from tailored solutions, but this is the best way to compensate for most apps not caring that I have seen yet.
I would imagine that LIMs becoming more popular could lead to further improvements in that regard, which might actually make more tailored solutions possible at some point. At least KDE already seems to be working on upstreaming this feature in this merge request, so I'm quite excited to see what might be possible in the future :)
On todays resolutions?!
And with SSD, I say how it has to look/behave, while with CSS it's the dev. Same problem like with web devs doing html font-size: 60%: it ignores my preferences.
Wasting thousands of pixels doesn't become okay just because you have millions. That space could be used for something useful like a search bar, instead of just the app name and three icons that are just keyboard shortcuts anyway.
Look, there are plenty of minimal no-space-wasting titlebars delivered with every distro and you can install additional ones or even create your own. And (likely) every WM has settings what to display where or at all. You can have your hated titlebar away with a few clicks.
However, with CSD, the app dev says it looks like this and you as a user can do nothing about it except patching and compiling the source.
One is do whatever and the other is i choose for you (which is exactly in line with Gnome thinking btw).
Since when did CSD become accepted, let alone encouraged? Titlebars should only ever be drawn by the system. This trend of individual applications drawing their own titlebars is a disaster that results in fragmentation and inconsistent behaviour. The absolute disaster that is the titlebars is one of the main reasons I cannot bring myself to use GNOME, recently.
I don't want a giant bar that only contains 3 icons and the name of the app. Why would you want that ?
I have SSDs off on all my machines.
It creates a clear heirarchy of information too. The system owns the title bar, so any operations there are system operations.
At one point browsers did something similar for security awareness-- real permission prompts, etc. were set a few pixels over into the main UI to establist that they were "real" and not part of the page content.
Most of the time, we're not so starved for pixels that we have tp be stealing from the title bar.
Hell, we lived thtough 640x480 desktops without even the cheat of hamburger menus.
Plus, when we actually are starved for space SSD allow the system to make the necessary adjustments.
One thing that dawned on me... maybe CSD and some of the "new" window management paradigms (tiling, card style, etc.) are symbiotic. If you aren't using the title bar for manipulating the window on a regular basis, you feel free to ignore or outright scramble it.
I use KDE. My configuration for the title bar includes a "keep on top" buttons (it's one of my favourite little Linux things, along with middle click paste, which of course GNOME also wants to remove). On the left side near the application icon. CSDs, which I sometimes use (e.g. Firefox) never include this.
I also can't just access the KWin menu by right clicking, as I would on a normal window, I have to right click the icon on the taskbar (I do use the windows grouping in the taskbar, and that means even more clicks) or I need to use Alt+F3. Which is not too hard, but it means needing two hands for something that should need one.
So there are applications that manage to make CSDs so useful that the drawbacks become acceptable, but it's honestly not too often.
All of these are (or can be made) accessible through shortcuts. I have SSDs off on my machines, they offer literally 0 functionality.
I still use KDE but I don't want more buttons, I want more content. Don't waste 5% of my screen height with basically nothing.