&gt; &gt; <i>Client side decorations give way more space to the actual content than to waste space for an almost empty titlebar.</i><p>&gt; <i>If Gnome 3 wanted to fix that, it should just replace its space-wasting default theme. And in reality it&#x27;s a non-issue everywhere else. No other desktop environment even has this debate.</i><p>Yes, other desktop environments have this debate. In Mac OSX, open any recent app and you&#x27;ll see titlebars with actions (e.g. play&#x2F;pause in iTunes, addressbar in Safari, etc.), presumably to compact window chrome.