Post by @ell1e@leminal.space

2026-03-28 10:34 UTC

Basically, on any sane window manager no matter if Wayland or X11, you'll get the same frame for all apps for free. From all the big desktops it's only GNOME that somehow decided server-side decorations weren't a good idea implement, and now all Wayland apps have to hand-roll a hacky workaround. The "flat frameless window" look was Electron's GNOME workaround. What the article is describing is a more elaborate GNOME workaround. On e.g. KDE, none of these problems existed in the first place.

Replies (1)

@Vittelius@feddit.org 2026-03-28 15:21

That's only mostly true and more importantly not what this is about. Yes Gnome and Mutter don't support server side decorations. But Electron on Linux uses GTK to construct the application window. And GTK offers client side system styled window decorations. Meaning that electron applications aleady supported decorations that look and feel like server side decorations even if they are not. > Electron already had some support for client-side decorations, provided by a class called ClientFrameViewLinux which uses GTK to paint convincing native window frames. These look very similar to the ones GNOME used to supply on X11, but they are produced entirely in-framework. No, the problem is with custom styled window decorations. Developers who wanted to do CSDs couldn't without major downsides. And that was also true on KDE Plasma, as evidenced by this screenshot from the article you evidently didn't read > ![](https://europe.pub/api/v3/image_proxy?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.electronjs.org%2Fassets%2Fimages%2Fvscodenocsd-6f2013f1656e09eff0cfca1e94fa0a71.png) See how the window for VS Code doesn't throw a shadow compared to Dolphin? That's because electron didn't support CSDs properly. And now that it does the window looks like this: >![](https://europe.pub/api/v3/image_proxy?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.electronjs.org%2Fassets%2Fimages%2Fvscodecsd-26e13ece78b184484cc8e27f122e3e99.png) That's what we are talking about.

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