I'm currently writing an article on the subject, and want to properly represent people's views.

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[–] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The biggest drawback of not providing any SSDs even as a fallback is obviously... what if the app just doesn't draw CSDs?

Wayland requires apps to be able to draw CSDs, so that's just a broken app. SSDs are optional extension. So the app should either use X11 (and rely on Xwayland to provide the decorations), or implement Wayland properly.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago*

    That's true from a technical perspective. But in reality devs (especially ones who aren't making "Linux apps" but are doing things like porting a previously Windows-only game to Linux) will occasionally ship a broken Wayland client. The compositor could then still give that a basic titlebar with window buttons like KDE and Cosmic do, or alternatively it can refuse to do it and make the novice user annoyed at the system as a whole.

    I'm not really convinced that requiring all Wayland clients to draw their own decorations was the correct decision in the first place, but even if we accept it, I think there's still a convincing case for fallback SSDs.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago

    so that’s just a broken app

    technically, yes. but at the end of the day, in the real world, that app would work fine on ~all but ~1 desktop compositor

    wayland doesn't require SSDs, because it's not just meant for desktop computing. in the context of desktop computing, it's been a standard for decades now to have a title bar on a window, so it does make sense that apps would assume they can get one without having their own drawing code or relying on a third-party library!

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