Vertical taskbars on MATE

[Little Girl]

Hey there,

Liam Proven wrote:
>Little Girl wrote:

>BeOS was a proprietary commercial OS and the company sadly failed
>about 15-20 years ago.
>
>There was a freeware eval edition of BeOS 5, and you could run that
>under a VM.

Thanks. Ordinarily I'd check it out, but if it's no longer being
developed, it's probably best not to.

>There is a modern FOSS successor OS called Haiku. That runs better on
>modern hardware, but it is unfinished, as yet only poorly-optimised,
>and is not ready for prime-time yet.
>
>BeOS, OTOH, was quite mature. It is the fastest OS on x86 I have ever
>seen. It would cold-boot from POST to desktop in about 5 seconds on a
>spinning hard disk, on a Pentium 200MHz with 128MB of RAM. It was
>deeply mutltithreaded and ran superbly on multiprocessor machines. It
>could spin a software-rendered OpenGL cube in real time, with a
>different MP4 movie on each face of the cube, playing smoothly. All
>on a single P200.

That kind of makes you wonder why they went under. Hopefully some of
their developers have come over to the Ubuntu team.

>Linux is an appalling sluggish bloated mess by comparison -- and I am
>talking about Linux in 2000, not now. Now it's 20x bigger and slower.

I agree that it's sluggish and bloated compared to what it could be.
It's a shame. It doesn't have to be. It's like developers use the
resources they can just because they're there rather than trying to
get their software to run with the smallest resource footprint
possible.

>I don't like Linux -- or Unix -- much. I only use it because it's
>better than the alternatives.

I like it all. If it plugs into a wall or runs on a battery and lets
me interact with it, it's a good thing.

>Once, there were basically 2 desktop-model UIs for FOSS Unix: GNOME
>and KDE.
>
>If you wanted GPL all the way down and preferred C, you worked on
>GNOME. If you wanted a more mature, rich GUI toolkit and didn't mind
>that it was proprietary freeware, and preferred C++, you worked on
>KDE.
>
>Both advanced a lot.
>
>Now, we have dozens that duplicate each other, and development is
>slow.

The advantage to that is that each of them goes in a different
direction, and we get to pick which direction we like. If there were
fewer of them, we'd have fewer choices despite their ability to
develop faster.

>If all desktops were truly modular and component-based, we could
>mix-and-match whatever we wanted.

I agree. We have that, to some degree, by choosing different desktops
to log into, but since each has very certain hooks into system
components, you end up with a lot of excess software when you add
desktops. A cleaner way of doing it would be nice.

>Budgie, for example, was clearly developed by a team who did not look
>at other desktops properly. There's nothing Budgie offers or does
>that other desktops can't. LXDE and Xfce can both reproduce something
>identical.

I'm downloading that right now to try it out.

>> I might be getting it mixed up with LXDE.  
>
>LXDE has a normal desktop too, with files, folders, symlinks, trash,
>etc.

Yep, I just tried it again and that one has a normal desktop. The
reason I rejected it was because the trash can't be put onto the
panel, which is a deal-breaker for me.

>Crunchbang didn't. GNOME 3 doesn't in recent versions. All other
>desktop model desktops that I can think of do; that is why they are
>called desktops.

>> It's sounding more and more like I got it mixed up with LXDE.  
>
>Nope. Something else, maybe.

It was definitely Xfce, but it looks like they've fixed it. I just
tried the latest version of Xubuntu and was able to create files and
folders on the desktop. That's definitely going to be kept as a
fall-back desktop for me now in case MATE falls over in the future.

>GNOME 3 and KDE  both just annoy me, though. They implement part of a
>system; KDE then just fails the rest because they didn't think of it,
>whereas GNOME is attempting to remove it, because its devs don't use
>things so they think nobody needs them.

I totally agree.

>Happiness and space efficiency lies in having _only_ a vertical one,
>and getting all the space back. A hybrid solution is no solution
>because you still lose the space.

Although that makes sense and since we definitely have more screen
real estate to give up for vertical bars than horizontal ones, I'm
wondering how long it would take to overcome years of habit and
muscle memory formed by accessing a horizontal bar thousands or
millions (or more) times.

>Stick an eval copy of Win10 in a VM -- it runs fine on VBox, you
>don't need to activate it or anything. ISOs are free from
>microsoft.com.

No need. I have more than one copy of Windows (10 and otherwise) here
for work.

>Windows still does it better than anything. Get a feel for it by
>playing around in Windows, then try the Xfce implementation.

I didn't realize Windows offered it as well. This is something I had
never explored until our recent experimentation with it in here.

>All I am saying is this: if your vertical panel implementation works
>right, then you don't need anything more. You don't need vertical
>text or anything tricksy like that, you just need a working, solid
>implementation. All the elements of the Windows desktop model --
>taskbar, notification tray, clock, app switcher, start menu,
>everything -- all of them were designed and planned to work in
>vertical orientation when the first version of Win95 shipped in 1995.

Interesting. It looks like I missed that entirely back then.

>It's just that most Linux desktops copy this model _badly_ and don't
>implement necessary functionality. The developers took only a casual
>look and copied only the surface appearance, and not how it actually
>*works*. So they don't even know that the functionality is missing.

I suspect the same thing. There's a lot obviously wrong with it the
moment you set it up and start trying things, which they would have
noticed if they'd messed around with it.

-- 
Little Girl

There is no spoon.