@Tio
@Nick @ The Linux Experiment maybe you'd understand Tio's points if we put it in a different context, this is similar analogy I made up about USB ports and laptops:

Person 1: My laptop company stopped making laptops with USB ports, now I can't connect my mic or webcam or mouse or portable hard disks or anything!

Person 2: Most (nontechnical) people don't use USB ports anymore, they can now use Bluetooth or wifi to connect most of the devices that they need.

Person 1: But I have some devices that requires a USB connection and they're not working.

Person 2: If you use complicated devices like that then you're on your own, you can't expect the manufacturer of your laptop to make their laptop work on your specific setup - its not their responsibility.

Person 1: They don't have to make sure things work perfectly on my end, but they should at least provide me with an optional USB port that I can use, it isn't so hard because they used to provide those before.

Person 2: They used to provide USB ports before but a lot of the USB devices people connected their laptop to didn't work as they should, so people started flooding the manufacturer's support forum asking why their laptops are not working when it was actually a problem with the specific USB device that they used and has nothing to do with the laptop itself 🤷

Person 1: Really?! I feel like if someone bought a USB device and it didn't work then they're more likely to blame that device first instead of thinking its a problem with the laptop itself 🤔

Person 2: Actually this happened because of some specialized stores that call themselves "distros" who sold out these laptops along with some USB accessories on a combo offer package - the thing is, they didn't properly test out all of the USB accessories before selling, so some of them just didn't work on the laptop they were sold with. The normal people who bought these distro-packages didn't knew about all these technical details so they expected the accessories they got to work well with the laptop, and when they found out that it didn't they started complaining to the laptop manufacturer. A lot of laptop brands got a bad rep because of this whole distro-package thing, so now they stopped making USB ports altogether to prevent these distro-shops from selling USB accessories on a combo-offer.

Person 1: Wow that's fucked up, I also own a distro-shop myself but I properly test all of my accessories and make sure they work well before selling them as a distro-package. Nowadays its getting hard for me because of these manufacturers who don't provide the USB port at all, before that I was able to somehow make all the accessories work on the laptop but now I have no option. Honestly, why do some of these USB accessories break in the first place? Can't they just make ones that work well?!

Person 2: A lot of USB accessories break because there's no common standard or an "API" as they call it, which dictates how USB ports and accessories talk to each other. So without such a standard there's no way to make sure your accessories work well on all laptops, so some of them are incompatible with certain laptops.

Person 1: Wow, then why are we not making an API or a common standard that works for all? That should solve all of the issues right?! Removing USB ports altogether just because some accessories were incompatible seems like backward thinking to me.

Person 2: You're probably right, creating an API would've been the best case scenario. But unfortunately its less likely to happen, laptop manufacturers are fed up with hearing these complaints from people so they'll probably stick with their decision to remove USB ports altogether, especially considering the whole distro-package situation and the mess it created - it hurt their brand image.

Person 1: TBH I prefer having a USB port, or at least an option to have that. Some accessories might be incompatible but most of them worked fine for me and I'd hate to lose all that.

Person 2: I don't think most normal people would be affected because like I said before they use bluetooth and wifi accessories now. Plus I've heard that the fruit company is making something called mac-laptop where they use a special type of USB port where only their official accessories work, so as long as you stick with the fruit ecosystem and only use their accessories you should be fine.

Person 1: This will hurt people who don't want to be on the fruit ecosystem, I still think its a bad idea to remove regular USB ports and replace it with a limited version of the same where only a few official fruit-accessories work. Plus there are some accessories that require a USB port to function, so normal users can't use them through Bluetooth or wifi like you assumed.

Maybe the analogy can be a bit too long.

I would say perhaps another good analogy is Apple's approach where they make their own headphones, and mouse, and hardware and only support that. And then they say to the rest: of course other devices that you wanna connect to ours may not work properly, you should buy our Apple products only! And them not providing any support for the driver side of things, even making it difficult for others to make drivers for their preferred webcam, or mouse, and such.

Now of course in reality no one will only stick to Apple's products. This is an unreasonable request and approach.

In the same way that no one will ever use ONLY gnome with ONLY gnome apps. Or KDE for that matter. It is naive to think like that.

And thus, the same way that people will connect non-apple devices to apple computers and many will create drivers for these, and yes some may not work as well as apple's ones, the same way people are going to use gnome apps on different distros and try to find a fix for the window decorations, theming and such.

It is a question of how much of an Apple are you. This is from the developer of the well known nocsd package:

Since Gtk+ 3.10, its developers added a so-called header bar or custom title bar. With this and the client-side decoration, the original title bar and window border provided by the window manager are disabled by Gtk+. This makes all Gtk+ 3 programs look alike. Even worse, this may break some window manager or compositors.

Unfortunately, the Gtk+ developers decided to be against the existing standards and provide "no option" to turn it off.

Based on his words Gnome made it difficult, if not impossible, to let the system do the window decorations. From this perspective only, Gnome is Apple. if they could at least allow the CSD to be easily disabled....

@Tio @Nick @ The Linux Experiment

> In the same way that no one will ever use ONLY gnome with ONLY gnome apps. Or KDE for that matter. It is naive to think like that.

The main reason why I (and many others) use Arch or an Arch based distro is because of the AUR and its app availability, I can't imagine being restricted to ONLY use gnome apps, or even KDE apps for that matter.

I also wanna respond to something else Nick said here before:

> It’s always the same argument: power users feel they’re losing access to customization, the rest of the world applauds more coherency and better design.

This assumption that power users are the only people affected by these changes is completely false, in fact in a lot of cases it's the contrary. Take the above video that Tio made for example, in it he's complaining about how he can't right click on his title bar to get those window options - this is because he's a normie Linux user who mainly uses GUI apps on his XFCE desktop environment, on the contrary I'm someone who you might refer to as a power user because I mostly use terminal programs and a window manager like DWM - so for me, and many other window manager users, we don't even have a title bar on top of our windows to click on! Lol 😂 This is because power users don't like to use mouse very much so they use keyboard shortcuts to do those things, similarly when we use terminal programs most of the time we're not affected by these problems that Tio is talking about - at least not as much as it affects regular users. I don't know what made you think Tio is a power user, he hates using the terminal man, lol 😆 You could say that Tio has more technical knowledge than the average person and I'd agree, but he also makes his parents, wife, and sister use his Linux distro to understand how nontechnical people experience these things - which is why he has a very good understanding of UX. The fact of the matter is that lack of customizability impacts regular everyday users the most, their eyes are gonna suffer if an app doesn't respect their dark mode, they're the ones that are gonna struggle reading if an app doesn't respect their font size, I've also heard of some font styles made for dyslexic people to read better - so if an app doesn't support these customizations then its bad UX and accessibility for normal people, power users are also affected by these accessibility issues but they're more likely to find a fix for it if there exists one.

On Mac you know that clicking the red dot on a window it closes it and that that there are 3 window buttons. The middle one (I think it is yellow) minimizes a window and the green (last) minimizes it. On Windows is different being represented with X, a square, and _ . If the system chooses to use one particular way for the window buttons and their position, then imagine when the Gnome apps do not respect that and put their own window buttons in whatever side of the app they desire. This is a bad thing for all "normal" users.

Shadows or borders for windows are also a good way of knowing what window is on top of other. If the system does a good job at that, but then the Gnome apps have no borders or no shadows, it beaks that consistency. Not to mention losing features like I explained in the video. You know there are people like Roko who do not use a mouse much, so they do not need a titlebar, but if Gnome enforces one with their own window buttons, it makes things more complicated and inconsistent.

Also accent colors are a quick hint of what you can click or what it is active. If you have different apps with different accent colors it can be very confusing.

But anyway, there should be 0 debates when it comes to the window decoration. This needs to be done by the system itself, else you lose all functionalities of the system and create a complete circus. As for the theming you can have some arguments against theming apps, but fact is people will theme their system. They do so o Mac, Windows, Android and Linux. So better we have a way for them to do it properly rather than being naive and expecting for them to only use the Gnome apps on the Gnome desktop. That's hilarious :).