I do not know of a way to remove this, but I can explain why it exists. The nautilus file manager uses a popular user interface toolkit called GTK. That’s what gives the style to buttons and overall aesthetics to the app.
One of the particular quirks with GTK is that they added the ability for applications to have the min, max, close buttons inside the top header bar of the application instead of that being on the window border (within the AppVM).
What qubes does is it creates an unsupportable colored border around applications, but in the case of GTK applications who have already close buttons, it’s not able to do a thing about it because it’s embedded within the application.
However, since it’s all free and open source software (FOSS) for sure someone has been able to remove those. But is it worth the trouble?
Ah! I see what you mean. I have checked and I do have window controls in the title bar on my debian-10 but not on fedora-33 (none of which are minimal):
Me neither. If you happen to have a github account (or don’t mind creating one), you could follow up perhaps on the linked github issue. Marek (the lead developer) has now re-opened that issue, so any information on diagnosing this issue could be useful to post there.
Edit On second thought, this issue I described many not affect the fedora-minimal. (only debian). So it may well be a missing package or something in your case?
I’ve also specified “fedora-minimal” in the title. Feel free to change it if you feel it’s not adequate.
I want to remove that X button from debian-11 template in Qubes 4.1. I just installed gnome-settings-daemon and reset everything. X button still exist in VMs based on that template. Also I want to use nautilus file manager in focal template. I have installed nautilus and qubes-core-agent-nautilus in that template but I don’t have there Qubes incoming folder, different loading page of nautilus and that X button.
Increasing surface attack by installing additional packages (especially to minimal templates) in order to get convenience and aesthetics is not what I would do.
I don’t want it on minimal. I want it on standard Debian template that I use for internet, and maybe on Focal that I use only for development since don’t want to messing with Debian if i got out of the box solution tailored for Ubuntu an I use that template only for that.
I know it’s always about convenience, and I respect that. For me it’s actually easier to close the window on that X, for example, so win-win for me. smaller attack surface combined with convenience.
If you installed gnome-settings-daemon in the debian-11 template, and it didn’t work, you can try the following.
Edit /etc/X11/Xsession.d/25xdg-qubes-settings and remove the lines
if [ -x /usr/bin/xsettingsd ]; then
installConfigurationFile "xsettingsd"
installConfigurationFile "fonts.conf"
installConfigurationFile "Xresources"
/usr/bin/xsettingsd &
fi
If xsettingsd is started, you can’t run another xsettings manager, preventing gsd-xsettings from starting.
In that case, it is probably better to just remove xsettingsd. Do you know why the developers decided to use xsettingsd in the debian templates and how removing these configuration files would affect usage?
I found these config files added with xsettingsd, but haven’t investigated them yet.
I do agree that it’s not very intuitive what you need to do to make it work with in Debian 11.
Only going by this thread, it seems like it stopped working in Debian 11, don’t know if something changed in that version.
Changing the settings manager breaks systems that are modified using xsettingsd, I had to redo my settings when I switched to GSD. I don’t think you can just remove xsettingsd and replace it with GSD, not with it having an impact on the systems using xsettingsd.
What exactly is broken with the GSD installation in your case? It seems that debian-gnome does not use xsettingd on systems without qubes, is this a solution of the qubes developers? After removing xsettingsd I didn’t notice any difference except:
Themes, fonts and icons got removed, and I had to add them again using gsettings.
The only problem it solved for me was that it removed the extra control buttons, which probably isn’t enough of a reason to force everyone to redo their settings without any warning.