Windows lack borders: visually unpleasant and leaves only one option to resize

[Florian Boucault]

The latest change in light-themes (bug #733233) to drop the window borders lowers the visual quality and the usability of the desktop for Metacity users. Unity 2D users are all affected as well as Classic desktop users with 'No Effects'.

Visually there is no frontier any more between application which just looks odd. I do not know of any other OS that does that. The main difference with Compiz is that Metacity does not have shadows.

Usability wise, the border was also use has a handle (probably too thin) to let the user resize the window. Without that border the user can only resize the window using the bottom right handle.

Proposal to re-apply zero-pixel borders:

  Bug #740579 ("Wishlist: move to 0px borders now that Unity and Unity-2D/Metacity can cope")

[Paul Sladen (sladen)]

Florian: thank you for bringing this up so quickly. I believe both njpatel and choatic raised 0px borders as potential issue for the 2D desktop during the early discussion from February so it's good to have that confirmed.

Out of interest, does it have any impact on any specific stalkholders (eg. OEM customers) have might mean that we'd have to solve it at a higher priority?

[Florian Boucault (fboucault)]

Thanks for getting back so quickly Paul.
In terms of OEMs I expect it to cause an issue on the visual side of things. They often watch new elements of design introduced in the development version of Ubuntu (Natty) as to know what to expect in their future products. It terms of timeline, it will not affect them before Natty is released and they decide to use it in their products.

[Paul Sladen (sladen)]

Mark: how keen are you on the 0px borders? Is this something we can safely revert back to 1px (easier to metacity and unity-2d) or something where we need to go and look at other solutions?

[Neil J. Patel (njpatel)]

We can solve this by beta, for !unity-window-decorator. There is no need to revert. if you Also affects Unity project I'll see that it's milestoned and done for beta, it shouldn't be difficult.

[Paul Sladen (sladen)]

Uploaded revert to 1px a few hours ago per:

  https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/light-themes/+bug/733233/comments/4

[Paul Sladen (sladen)]

light-themes (0.1.8.10) natty; urgency=low

  * {Amb,Rad}iance/metacity-1/metacity-theme-1.xml
    Revert borders to 1px (blandness, and issues with
    Metacity and Unity-2D). (LP: #733431, #733233)

[Johan Kiviniemi (ion)]

There probably should be a border for a non-composited environment and no border for composited one.

[Sam Spilsbury (smspillaz)]

On Mon, Mar 14, 2011 at 3:02 AM, Johan Kiviniemi
<email address hidden> wrote:
> There probably should be a border for a non-composited environment and
> no border for composited one.

I agree, Especially because "invisible anything" in a non-composited
environment will be an absolute nightmare to implement.

It might be worth looking to *cough* patch metacity again *cough* to
support parts of themes with a "compositing" and "not compositing"
tag, though I'd like to discuss this upstream first, since our
patching is getting a bit out of control.

>
> --
> You received this bug notification because you are a member of Unity
> Bugs, which is subscribed to unity.
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/733431
>
> Title:
>  Windows lack borders: visually unpleasant and leaves only one option
>  to resize
>
> Status in Ayatana Design:
>  Incomplete
> Status in Light Themes:
>  Fix Released
> Status in Unity:
>  Invalid
> Status in Unity 2D:
>  Fix Released
>
> Bug description:
>  The latest change in light-themes (bug #733233) to drop the window
>  borders lowers the visual quality and the usability of the desktop for
>  Metacity users. Unity 2D users are all affected as well as Classic
>  desktop users with 'No Effects'.
>
>  Visually there is no frontier any more between application which just
>  looks odd. I do not know of any other OS that does that. The main
>  difference with Compiz is that Metacity does not have shadows.
>
>  Usability wise, the border was also use has a handle (probably too
>  thin) to let the user resize the window. Without that border the user
>  can only resize the window using the bottom right handle.
>

--
Sam Spilsbury

[Mariano Chavero (marianochavero)]

Could "Metacity Compositing_Manager" be setup as default for Unity-2d and Ubuntu Classic?
The borderless windows look beautiful with shadows, and most PC's and Netbooks that meet the recommended minimum requirements shouldn't have any problems running it.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/SystemRequirements

It's just an idea.. I hope it helps ;)

[Sam Spilsbury (smspillaz)]

Hardware support is still needed for XComposite unfortunately.

On Mon, Mar 14, 2011 at 1:49 PM, marianochavero
<email address hidden> wrote:
> Could "Metacity Compositing_Manager" be setup as default for Unity-2d and Ubuntu Classic?
> The borderless windows look beautiful with shadows, and most PC's and Netbooks that meet the recommended minimum requirements shouldn't have any problems running it.
>
> https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/SystemRequirements
>
> It's just an idea.. I hope it helps ;)
>
> --
> You received this bug notification because you are a member of Unity
> Bugs, which is subscribed to unity.
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/733431
>
> Title:
>  Windows lack borders: visually unpleasant and leaves only one option
>  to resize
>
> Status in Ayatana Design:
>  Incomplete
> Status in Light Themes:
>  Fix Released
> Status in Unity:
>  Invalid
> Status in Unity 2D:
>  Fix Released
>
> Bug description:
>  The latest change in light-themes (bug #733233) to drop the window
>  borders lowers the visual quality and the usability of the desktop for
>  Metacity users. Unity 2D users are all affected as well as Classic
>  desktop users with 'No Effects'.
>
>  Visually there is no frontier any more between application which just
>  looks odd. I do not know of any other OS that does that. The main
>  difference with Compiz is that Metacity does not have shadows.
>
>  Usability wise, the border was also use has a handle (probably too
>  thin) to let the user resize the window. Without that border the user
>  can only resize the window using the bottom right handle.
>

--
Sam Spilsbury

[Florian Boucault (fboucault)]

Actually, it seems to run quite smoothly in software as far as I could tell.
The biggest blocker to this would be the stability of the compositing code path in Metacity. There are quite a few critical bugs. GNOME's bugzilla has a potentially incomplete/outdated list of them:

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?bug_status=REOPENED&bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=UNCONFIRMED&bug_status=NEEDINFO&field0-0-0=component&field1-0-0=product&query_format=advanced&type0-0-0=substring&type1-0-0=substring&value0-0-0=Iain's%20compositor&value1-0-0=metacity&order=bug_severity,bug_id%20DESC&query_based_on=

[Mariano Chavero (marianochavero)]

I'm very sorry to hear that. I've been using Compositing_Manager on unity-2d virtualized with no Graphics Acceleration-1gb of RAM and it looks very cool... Anyway, I know you guys will make it look even better (Thumbs Up)

[Paul Sladen (sladen)]

Per Florian in: https://code.launchpad.net/~dashua/light-themes/border-less.metacity.and.fixes/+merge/54439

  "To be very clear, no one did any work on the Unity 2D side. (...) it is a general metacity issue."

Ideally the status of "unity-2d" should be marked "Invalid" or "Won't Fix". The current status of "Fix Commited/Released" is mis-leading and has lead to confusion.

[Mark Shuttleworth (sabdfl)]

There needs to be a task on metacity (or the theme) so we can track the
status of the needed fixes.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.