I've been searching around, and, in mandriva there used to be an option to integrate the close/minimize/restore buttons onto the title bar, but, i'm not seeing this option anywhere else, or on any other distro, as i think it was a custom mandriva thing(2010).

However, maybe i'm missing something, but, is this an option? to remove the "border" but keep the close/minimize/restore buttons? thanks.

You want to do what?
The buttons are in the titlebar, if you'd want to integrate them into the client (like into the menubar) you'd have to move window management into the client (what chromium can do and what is generally not much appreciated because it crosses actual window management) or implement a decoration that reparents the buttons into the client and removes the actual decoration widget (titlebar) - there used to be a decoration for KDE3 that did such.

If you just wish to remove the side/bottom borders but keep the titlebar, at least Oxygen, Bespin & QtCurve can do that - for other decorations i'm not sure.

Well, some window decorations use "hacks" to achieve this, e.g. http://kde-look.org/content/show.php/Ch ... ent=119069.

Ah, forgot about that one. It's basically a port of mentioned KDE3 deco
http://kde-look.org/content/show.php/Fitz?content=19455
and will likely just use the same reparenting approach (as the resize handles of Oxygen & Bespin do)

Issue with those decos was and is that they may cover relevant content in the window, so reasonably one would require (dynamic) hiding (just excluding dialog hardly cuts it) like eg. only presenting an outline border and show the buttonbar on edge hovering etc.
Another issue is antialiasing -ie. translucency- which does not (simply) work with reparenting so one would actually have to keep them independent windows and fix stacking and position with window move/resize - ideally through kwin core support (requires eventfiltering for the repositioning and stackorder fixes are not easy to do at all)