Windows spawning larger than the screen are tedious even for experienced users, at least the only fix I know is to resize them from the top-left toward the center, then move them back into the corner.
However, for inexperienced users I can easily imagine them being completely stranded by this, since they cannot just reach into the cut-off corner with the mouse and drag it back.
So I think after seeing who won’t fix it, I’d like to ask what component might actually be most likely to do something about it, due to the big impact. Edit: so that I can then forward it to that component using a hopefully actionable issue ticket.
IIRC, a lot of UI (including some places in KDE) assumes a 800x600 minimum logical screen size. So if you have a smaller screen, UI elements will be cut off anyway. Is this the case for “widely used GTK+ applications” you mentioned (who are they?), or do they default to an even larger size?
It’s hard to test later because many will save the last window size and then it’ll be correct on 2nd launch, but on 1st launch many (all?) GTK3 apps are affected. GIMP for example is among them.
KDE System Settings is partially affected in that if you resize it to screen size but without maximizing it, then increase the DPI scaler, then it’ll remain too vertically large and get cut off even when the logical screen size is still large enough for its minimum window size.
Honestly, having a rule in the window manager (probably the place, it sounds like a window management function) that says along the lines of “windows should not spawn larger than the display resolution” seems like a reasonable idea to me. It irritates me to no end when I pull a tab out of firefox by accident and it often has a vertical dimension greater than my desktop and I don’t suffer from a small screen.
I see. GIMP seems to default to a width of 1024, but it can be manually resized to ~600.
I’ll try making a kwin script that tries its best to keep new windows within screen boundary. It might be “rude” for a window manager to resize app windows by itself, but nothing wrong for a user script to do so, because the user has the final say.
BTW, I do wish kwin has a window-tagging system, so instead of every effect / script has a black / white list, we can just tag no-autoresize, no-dimming, force-tiling, etc., on windows.
Would it be, if the window is resizable and the minimum size would fit the screen?
This is already the default behavior for X11 and didn’t seem to be questioned much as a possibly useful solution on the issue tracker either. It’s just that apparently it’s difficult to fix in KWin, or something.