My laptop has a display resolution of 1366x768. Every now and then, I’ll encounter a window whose default height is over 768 and thus won’t fit entirely within my screen. The GTK file picker comes to mind, though it is resizable without much fuss. But then there are those that cannot be resized and being unable to move the titlebar further up, I am forced to use Alt+F7 to see what’s at the bottom.
I suspect that many programs today are designed to work comfortably on higher resolution displays, but not really tested on smaller ones. Understandably, developers only have so much time and 1366x768 is getting long in the tooth. Just wanted to put this out there since nobody seems to be talking about it.
I don’t understand the posh stylistic decisions around padding, rounded borders, etc. How do those things make the UI better exactly?
As someone who used low resolutions for most of my University years (I did my thesis in a tiny ultralaptop), I relied heavily on a custom gtk2 theme I had to write to remove most of that padding that made the UI feel so unnecessary and my screen so cramped.
Gnome now pushing for removing theming completely and relying on just color scheme customization feels totally backwards to me. I don’t have an answer for OP sadly… other than just using terminal / tui apps more whenever possible.
I use Xfce with Bspwm as a window manager. A plugin writes the window title in the status bar. Window decoration is just a rectangular outline. Its hard to get a more space efficient gui.
I’m in the camp of liking the padding and rounding to the point of having themed a bunch of sites to look similar with user css
I am however usually on high res screens and am in the habit of removing everything unnecessary from the screen to make space with my theming
Also generally if I open graphical applications at all it’s because I want it to look nice and clean, if I wanted pure space efficiency I’d just use the terminal for everything all the time