Vertical taskbars on MATE

[Peter Flynn]

Enlightenment has settings for vertical taskbars, if I understand rightly 
what you mean by 'taskbar'. I thought most window managers did...

P

On 26 August 2018 04:04:03 Little Girl <littlergirl at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.
>
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