Vertical taskbars on MATE

[Little Girl]

Hey there,

Liam Proven wrote:
>Little Girl wrote:

>BeOS is dead, yes.
>
>However, if you have hardware old enough to run it, it is instructive
>to play with it for a few hours.

I've got an old laptop that might work for that.

>As I said before: 20y ago, on (for example) a 133MHz single-core
>Pentium with 128MB of RAM, it booted faster and was more responsive
>than the machine I'm typing on -- a quad-core Retina iMac with 24GB
>of RAM and an SSD.

I think the same can be said for booting into a DOS environment as
opposed to any of the environments we boot into today.

>Almost nobody who is only used to 21st century computers realises how
>vastly bloated and underperforming modern OSes are.

I'm totally with you on that. I also wish that some of the developers
wouldn't use the resources they know are likely to be available, but
would make it a personal challenge to use as few resources as
possible.

>Another example: the QNX Demo Disk.

>http://toastytech.com/guis/qnxdemo.html

>A complete multitasking desktop, plus an Internet stack, and a web
>browser, on a single bootable 1.4MB floppy.

>No install. Boots from RAM.

Bookmarked. Very cool.

>Ubuntu can no longer even fit onto a single 650MB CD.

I know. This was disappointing. We no longer bother burning it to
archive it. We just put it onto a USB stick and overwrite it when
there's a new version.

>Haiku is alive and well and about to ship beta 1:
>
>https://www.haiku-os.org/
>
>This works surprisingly well -- I have a nightly build on a spare
>machine. Wifi, web browsers, the lot.
>
>IMHO it is the most complete and polished FOSS desktop OS out there
>after the FOSS Unixes. Haiku is far ahead of Plan 9/Minix/NetBSD and
>stuff like that. Personally I rate it ahead of FreeBSD / TrueOS but
>others' mileage may vary there.
>
>For a real feel, try it on hardware, not in a VM.
>
>It is very pleasant to use, but far far slower and less responsive
>than the proprietary original. Still a lightweight OS today, though.

This one is also interesting. Bookmarked. If I test it in a VM, it
will be on this fast one, but my older laptop would probably give it
a more realistic test.

>> 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.  
>
>I would agree if that were happening, but it isn't. They're all
>flogging the same dead horse, the Win95 model.

I still feel that they're each doing it differently, even if the basic
underlying structure is the same, and I'm glad for the choices. The
thing I dislike the most, as a consumer of anything at all, is being
cornered into one choice or into a small sampling of choices with
none of them being appealing.

>GNOME 3 is a bit different but as discussed it alienates many users.

Agreed.

>Budgie is slightly different but it just goes to a vast amount of
>work to duplicate what you could do in half an hour of customising
>Xfce or MATE.

I took a quick look at it and it's very similar to the other basic
offerings, but I still feel that's a good thing. You never know which
of them will tweak one or two things to make their offering
absolutely perfect for you.

>Elementary OS are doing something slightly different, but not by
>much.
>
>The developers of both chose to re-invent the wheel instead of seeing
>what was out there.
>
>E.g. Elementary reproduces a Mac OS X-like look and feel.
>
>Mac OS X developed from NeXTstep. There's an existing FOSS recreation
>of NeXTstep:
>
>http://gnustep.org/

I'm not at all a fan of Mac OS X. I've never used it, but the
placement of the icons on the title bar, the fact that the menu items
are up in the panel, and the presence of the dock are enough to send
me off in another direction. None of that is my style.

>Another innovative desktop I like is ROX:
>
>http://rox.sourceforge.net/desktop/
>
>No Linux distro includes either GNUstep or ROX, sadly, nor ever has.

ROX is rather interesting. I've actually played around with that quite
a bit in the past. It's so different from traditional desktops that I
wouldn't want to switch to it permanently if I didn't have to since
doing so would require a major shift to the usual work-flow, but it
sure is fast and responsive. If I were forced to choose a
non-traditional desktop, I'd definitely go with ROX, though, and I
suspect that, once I got used to how it presents information and how
to navigate around in it quickly, I might even prefer this over more
traditional approaches. It's just that the initial hump of adjustment
would be a bit rough.

>> 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.  
>
>Yep. As I said, both LXDE and Xfce can do that. I've never seen a
>version of either that could not.

It was a few years ago. You'd have to grab older versions of XFCE to
see it. It had what looked like a desktop, but you couldn't create or
put folders or files on it. When we contacted the developers to ask
about it, they said they considered that a feature, so we thought it
was hopeless to expect it ever to change. It's nice to see that
they've rethought or revisited that.

>> 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.  
>
>I persuaded a few colleagues to try at my last full-time job before I
>left the UK.
>
>Just before the company downsized, they refreshed their desktop
>fleet. They also fired the IT guy and outsourced it.
>
>There was a pile of old PCs and screens in the corner.
>
>I pulled an old LCD out of the pile and hooked it to my PC's unused
>VGA port as a 2nd screen. I didn't have admin rights, but for that
>you don't need them.
>
>I now had a big wide desktop, and I put the taskbar on the left.

Do you mean that you spread your desktop out over both monitors? If
so, I've never tried this. When I use multiple monitors, I have an
iteration of the desktop on each one.

>My colleagues marvelled. Never had they seen this sorcery.
>
>I could have 20+ apps open with readable-sized taskbar buttons. They
>were amazed.
>
>Some copied me. Some kept it, some didn't.
>
>But a few weeks later, everyone in the office had a 2nd screen on
>their computer. :-D

Oh, no argument here from me. Ever. I wonder how I did without two
monitors as long as I did. It's definitely a liberating experience.

>Quite a few of 'em didn't understand how window-management works and
>could not get the hang of moving windows on to the 2nd monitor.
>Having it sitting there empty embarrassed them so some disconnected
>them again.

That's a shame. I had sort of a similar issue when I had mismatched
monitor brands making it so that the screens didn't line up with each
other. One was a bit higher up. I tried to deal with it, but your
mind is a powerful thing. It wanted me to drag things upward because
that's what my eyes saw, but it needed me to drag them straight
across, because that would actually get me where I needed to go. I was
unable to adjust to it after over a month, so I finally put shims
under the shorter monitor to line them up and that solved it. I've
since replaced those monitors, but haven't forgotten that. We need
what we need.

>Honestly, it takes no more than a day or 2 to get used to a taskbar
>on the side. Just do it full time and you'll get used to it. Don't
>weaken. It's not hard.

I'll think about it.

>> No need. I have more than one copy of Windows (10 and otherwise)
>> here for work.  
>
>Right. So try it. It works on every version of Windows since Windows
>95 v1.0.

I did and it does work. I'm not a fan of it removing the text,
though, and just showing icons. I like to see a teaser of what I have
open rather than just an icon of the application it's open in. I have
a feeling I'll remain a horizontal panel person who will add a
vertical panel for some things, but not switch over entirely.

>Actually, it worked in the betas before that -- I ran the later
>ones. :-)

I believe you.

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

>It's been there for about 24 years. :-)

I guess we don't always realize everything there is to know about an
environment that we find ourselves in if it meets our needs without
causing us to feel compelled to explore it further.

-- 
Little Girl

There is no spoon.