This has struck a nerve. The following rant isn’t addressed to any specific person - I’m just venting.
This has been an issue forever, and for some reason, there are still people defending it. I understand that it may be hard to fix, but defending the behavior is ridiculous. Asking the user to hold in a special key is NOT the answer. You can resize the windows on basically every other OS by dragging the corner, and this does in fact work on MATE too - it just sucks.
Issues like this are why Linux on the mainstream desktop will continue to struggle.
When a “regular” person goes to resize their window for the first time, they’re going to move the mouse cursor to the border and see that it temporarily changes to the resize handle, which will cause them to assume that the window can be resized. However, when they go to actually try to resize the window, they will realize that there’s only like a one pixel region that can be grabbed.
People expect to be able to resize windows by dragging them. It just makes sense.
It’s one thing to simply not support it. I could understand that (well, not really…). However, that’s not the case here. It IS supported, it’s just very hard to use.
Why are we worried about HiDPI, GTK3, etc., when basic usability issues like this have existed for so long?