Vertical taskbars on MATE

[Liam Proven]

On Wed, 5 Sep 2018 at 21:25, Little Girl <littlergirl at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hey there

Hi!

> >BeOS is dead, yes.
>
> I've got an old laptop that might work for that.

Probably needs to be roughly turn-of-the-century: a 15YO machine might work.

The free demo version of BeOS is here:

https://archiveos.org/beos/

Its successor, Zeta, effectively BeOS 6, is harder to find as there
was no free version.

This might work:

https://archive.org/details/archiveorg_malenki_Zeta

Zeta was from 2007 or so. Should work on roughly 10YO hardware.

It's deeply multithreaded and really wants lots of CPU cores. A
desktop is more likely to give a good experience than a laptop, as it
may not work well with power management, wifi etc.

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

Well, yes, but BeOS/Zeta is a multicore multithreaded multitasking
multimedia OS with a rich GUI, networking, etc. It's a complete modern
OS, not a single-tasking executable-loader like DOS.

Ditto QNX.

> 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.

I am running it on a Thinkpad X200. Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM. Works well,
wifi etc and all.

> 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.

It's like having gone from a whole menu to 6 different types of
beefburger and nothing but beefburger.

I mean, I don't mind a burger now and then, but if I could eat nothing
else but burgers, I don't know if I could face living.

The taskbar-and-start-menu thing _is_ the desktop now.

GNOME and Unity mucked around a bit because they were scared of an MS lawsuit:

https://www.theregister.co.uk/Print/2013/06/03/thank_microsoft_for_linux_desktop_fail/

They aren't beefburgers any more.

But they are both sandwiches with bread around a beef filling.

I want stir-fry, I want curry, I want pasta, I want a biryani, I want
tagine with couscous.

I want stuff that is totally different and in no way resembles filling
between or on top of bread.

Why? Because no matter how good it is, there is more to life.

Every smartphone has a radically different UI which is nothing like
the Windows model. And yet virtually everyone who uses a PC also uses
a phone with no context-switching impedance.

We are _all_ mentally flexible enough to do this. We just got lazy.

30y ago the world had a hundred types of restaurant. Now, the choice
is Burger King vs Mc Donald's vs occasionally a gourmet fancy burger.

I am not OK with that.

> 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.

Not really. No taskbar as such. No start menu as such. It's as
different as Unity or GNOME 3.

What annoys me is that they are so lacking in imagination, they
rewrote from scratch something you could build out of Xfce in 10min.

What a huge waste of effort.

> I'm not at all a fan of Mac OS X. I've never used it,

Hang on, hang on.

You can't say you don't like something you've never tried!

> but the
> placement of the icons on the title bar,

What? You mean window buttons? They're the same as Unity.

> the fact that the menu items
> are up in the panel,

What? It doesn't have "panels". And the menu bar being up there is
from 1984 and is the most tried-and-tested GUI design in the world.
Nothing older survives.

I'm not saying it should be to anyone's taste, but it _works_.

Please, *PLEASE* try something that isn't a damned beefburger! You
have to get out there and live!

> and the presence of the dock are enough to send
> me off in another direction. None of that is my style.

Nothing wrong with docks. The MS taskbar is a modified dock.

Again you're saying you won't try a plate of spaghetti because it's
not in a bun.

> 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 worked better on RISC OS because all the apps were compliant. On
Linux most don't integrate. :-(

> 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.

All I can say is that I have been evaluating both for well over a
decade and a half and I have never seen what you describe.

However, it does fit Crunchbang, to pick one example.

> 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.

Yes. It's the default on GNOME, Unity, KDE, Xfce, LXDE, Cinnamon and
every other Linux desktop I have ever tried. On Windows it is the only
way it can work.

> 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.

You need to try Xinerama, then!

> 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.

Never bothered me, but I do arrange my monitors so they're level if I can.

> I did and it does work. I'm not a fan of it removing the text,
> though, and just showing icons.

In Win8/8.1/10, choose "small icons" for the text to come back.

> I like to see a teaser of what I have
> open rather than just an icon of the application it's open in.

Hover over the button for that.

> 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.

Then you don't get the benefit of the extra space. So it's not worth
it. It's all or nothing, I'm afraid.

> 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.

One thing that annoys me is that in the few Linux desktops that do
support it, you have to mess around in multiple dialog boxes.

On Windows, it's dead simple:
[1] right-click taskbar
[2] untick "locked"
[3] drag to preferred edge

Done.

When Linux makes stuff harder or more complex than on Windows, it has
failed. There's no excuse.

-- 
Liam Proven - Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
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