gtk3-nocsd

To me, the worst part is when GTK introduced what's known as "client-side decorations"[0], because that means that I can't use my normal window manager decorations. If I force them on with something like gtk3-nocsd[1], then although I get my normal window manager decorations back, sometimes the client-side decorations have actual important widgets in them like menu buttons. When that happens, I end up with windows that have both kinds of decorations, and it looks weird. For me this means that it's not nice to use apps like Meld and Remmina. Just let me use my own WM's decorations please! [0] https://wiki.gnome.org/Initiatives/CSD [1] https://github.com/PCMan/gtk3-nocsd

The titlebars are a design choice made by the app developer, not by GNOME. At least in the sense that it's only part of GNOME's design guidelines, app developers using GTK don't have to follow it if they don't want. There are various ways you can configure/modify a GTK app to hide the titlebars and attempt to use server-side decorations. But either way you are faced with the choice of potentially hiding important functionality if the app developer has decided to put buttons in the titlebar, or having two titlebars like with this patch: https://github.com/PCMan/gtk3-nocsd

Another great example is CSD (client-side decorations). Classic X window managers do not handle them well, and many users do not want them, but they were added in GTK+ 3.10 with no reasonable way for the window manager to disable them. Basically breaking all environments besides Gnome. Thus work-arounds like https://github.com/PCMan/gtk3-nocsd