Comments on: Vertical panel in GNOME

By: Peter Lecki

Peter Lecki — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 07:38:25 +0000

There a workaround suggested here:
http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-583908.html

It works great for me… Not only does it solve the task list problem but also the time/date!

By: Abel Cheung

Abel Cheung — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 10:52:13 +0000

Even just checking out the clock alone knows the GNOME gods have completely abandoned vertical panel and discourage others from doing the same. Current clock sucks completely with vertical panel (yes, they want people to read text rotated 90 degrees). And they never ever considered an analog clock as something necessary. That’s quite possible if all of them uniformly use horizontal panel, thus vertical clock automatically become something only uber-tweakers would ever want to use.

(The analog clock patch I pointed to is outdated, I don’t want to modify gnome panel source code everytime after a bug fix or even normal update. It’s SO annoying and cumbersome.)

By: Alexander Kojevnikov

Alexander Kojevnikov — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 12:45:35 +0000

@James: Thanks mate!

By: James

James — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 12:42:01 +0000

They are great for watching films and playing games but this comes at a cost — you end up with less vertical pixels.]

“FEWER” vertical pixels

By: Alexander Kojevnikov

Alexander Kojevnikov — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 03:26:13 +0000

@Tim

I personally don’t like hiding panels. I want to see the information on the panel all the time without unnecessary mouse moves / key presses. But it’s a matter of preference of course.

By: Alexander Kojevnikov

Alexander Kojevnikov — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 03:21:57 +0000

@C. Conrad Cady

I agree that it’s much more flexible and it’s a good thing. The bad thing is that this flexibility introduces too many possibilities, and it’s hard to properly test them all.

I suppose there should be a balance between the number of features and their quality. I probably would not complain at all if the panels were stuck only to the top or the bottom, but if they can be docked to the side of the screen, I expect things to work.

The problem is indeed not in the panel itself but in individual applets, but these are very basic applets that everyone is expected to use. Most of them are even part of the gnome-panel sub-project.

By: Tim

Tim — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 23:00:11 +0000

Why not just have a hiding panel on the bottom/top if the gnome panel will do it? I use KDE for my desktop most of the time (Windowmaker when I want something uber-fast and light) and have a normal CRT monitor for my desk. I also have our vizio hdtv setup as a second monitor for watching movies right on the tv from the comp and I set the panel for that screen so that it auto-hides immediately after the cursor leaves it, and when the cursor is moved to the bottom edge of the screen it pops back up. Whenever we’d have a movie playing and I’d click back on my main screen to do something, the panel on the tv would come to the front and distract from the movie and this works great. Plus it’s only taking up space when I need it.

By: C. Conrad Cady

C. Conrad Cady — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 19:23:27 +0000

I am quite happy putting the “Main Menu”, “Notification Area”, “Clock”, “Show Desktop Button”, “Window Selector” and individual icon launchers into a vertical panel, and having the “Window List” and “Workspace Switcher” in a horizontal panel.

(But, of course, you are right — trying to put the the “Window List” into a vertical bar does not work well in Gnome. I would not have used my two-panel scheme at all if it had worked the way I planned in the first place.)

That said, the nice thing about the Gnome-panels is that you have *way* more flexibility than the Vista panel. That fact that I can make as many as I want, and move them around if nice. I think the bugs are in the individual applets, rather than Gnome-Panel itself.

By: rawsausage

rawsausage — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 14:44:23 +0000

Vertical bars eat up too much of the screen estate anyways. I for one would never want to see any such on my desktop.

By: Alexander Kojevnikov

Alexander Kojevnikov — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 10:29:31 +0000

The problem with vertical text is that it’s hardly readable at all. Also, the height of the monitor is much less than its width, meaning it’s harder to fit everything in if vertical text is used.

On the other hand, horizontal text on a vertical panel works much better. It takes otherwise useless space of wide-screen monitors. It also can fit much more open windows, short-cuts, and other eye-candy on it than the horizontal panel.