Sway and client side decorations January 27, 2018 on Drew DeVault's blog

You may have recently seen an article from GNOME on the subject of client side decorations (CSD) titled Introducing the CSD Initiative. It states some invalid assumptions which I want to clarify, and I want to tell you Sway’s stance on the subject. I also speak for the rest of the projects involved in wlroots on this matter, including Way Cooler, waymonad, and bspwc.

The subject of which party is responsible for window decorations on Wayland (the client or the server) has been a subject of much debate. I want to clarify that though GNOME may imply that a consensus has been reached, this is not the case. CSD have real problems that have long been waved away by its supporters:

We are willing to cooperate on a compromise, but GNOME does not want to entertain the discussion and would rather push disingenuous propaganda for their cause. The topic of the #wayland channel on Freenode includes the statement “Please do not argue about server-side vs. client-side decorations. It’s settled and won’t change.” I have been banned from this channel for over a year because I persistently called for compromise.

GNOME’s statement that “[server-side decorations] do not (and will never) work on Wayland” is false. KDE and Sway have long agreed on the importance of these problems and have worked together on a solution. We have developed and implemented a Wayland protocol extension which allows the compositor and client to negotiate what kind of decorations each wishes to use. KDE, Sway, Way Cooler, waymonad, and bspwc are all committed to supporting server-side decorations on our compositors.


See also: Martin Flöser of KDE responds to GNOME’s article

Articles from blogs I read Generated by openring

Playing osu! Locus 2025

greetings. in this blog post i will compare the musical structure of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star against that of Camellia - crystallized, neither of which are entries in the Locus contestMost of the music in osu! is from outside sources. The Locus (2025) …

via Cadence's Weblog August 20, 2025

Upcoming changes to Hare's event loop library

hare-ev is an important Hare library that provides an event loop for Hare programs, similar to libuv, which most Hare programs which perform asynchronous I/O depend on for that purpose. I’ve been working on some design improvements over the past couple of we…

via Blogs on The Hare programming language July 30, 2025

SourceHut is now accepting payments in Euro

I’m pleased to announce that, as part of our broader plans to migrate SourceHut to Europe, and after many months of hard work, SourceHut has begun to accept subscription payments in Euro today – one of our oldest and most highly demanded feature requests. Th…

via Blogs on Sourcehut July 10, 2025