Vertical panels in GNOME

[Liam Proven]

2009/4/21 David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com>:
> 2009/4/21 Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com>:
>
>> I'm not alone! This has been badly bugging me for literally years...
>> But alas looks like the GNOME devs aren't interested.
>> http://versia.com/2008/06/08/vertical-panel-in-gnome/
>> With widescreens becoming universal - or, as in my case, twin monitors
>> - this is an issue of growing importance, but it doesn't look likely
>> to change any time soon.
>
>
> GNOME 3.0 will contain only a single button. When the user pushes it,
> it pops up a beautifully anti-aliased text box on a white screen
> telling the user to use a pen and a piece of paper to do their work
> and to shut their computer off.

I mustardmitt that when I read this post - and its comments - I
thought of the conversation you & I had online a year or 2 back about
GNOME vs. KDE.

I may switch desktops, at least experimentally. I love the look of
WindowMaker and GNUstep but it's not straightforward to get that
running. I also rather fancy ROX, which again, is not in the repos in
its full form. I may just go for Xfce for now. I had gone right off
KDE by the time 3 came out, and I've tried KDE 4.0 and 4.1 and I
didn't like them at all. They feel very clunky to me, and the themes -
my gods! Teh ugleh, it burnssss. I want Red Hat's Bluecurve theme on
Ubuntu. It's the only KDE theme I've ever seen that did not actually
offend me by its nastiness; I thought it looked rather professional,
in fact.

Not played with KDE 4.2 yet; I must.

But in more general terms than my personal aesthetic preferences :¬) :
the thing is, I am not asking for great customisabilty or flexibility.
I don't need 2,048 options to twiddle. Most of GNOME suits me just
fine. I just want the panel to do what the Windows panel does when
placed vertically. I want quicklaunch & notification-area icons in
rows when I widen the panel, not for them to just get HUUUUUGE. I want
a window switcher that has constant-size buttons and fits as many as
it can in, rather than ones that divvy up the total available space,
so they start out huge then shrink, maxing out at 7 and then snapping
into 2 unreadable columns.

I'm actually not asking for a lot. I just want it to behave like the
Windows one that it, frankly, copies.

On a widescreen, a vertical taskbar/panel works really well & doesn't
actually take much getting used to. Only with GNOME, you get this ugly
broken crippled  thing. Works, I am told, in KDE - I've not tried.

-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven
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