Does anyone really use XFCE panel in vertical or deskbar mode?

[figueroa]

Andy, can you link to a bigger photo? From this size it looks like your dock panel is clashing in color with your wallpaper.

In case you mean this Andy (me), I posted a link to the full-size screen shot above, in my original post.

[Antediluvian]

Coming from Mac before XP, and using a wide screen monitor (16x9) it makes sense to me to have a left vertical panel. I don't like my Panel to automatically hide because when I bring my mouse to the left to click on something near the edge of the window the Panel pops out and gets in the way. So I keep the Panel visible and use the Workspace Switcher settings to force all windows out of the Panel. You do that by right clicking on the Workspace Switcher and then: Workspace Switcher > Appearance > Workspace Settings > Margins tab > make the left margin 1 more than the width of the Panel. Set the top, bottom and right margins to 0. Your open windows with maximize to full screen minus the Panel real estate.

[Side note: If you have more than 1 workspace in a vertical panel then it looks better if you make the number of rows equal to the number of workspace you set up. That is, Workspace Switcher > Appearance > Number of rows = the number of work spaces you want. I also rename my workspaces to a short name (as you can see in the attachment) and set the desktop to a different background for each Workspace. By the way, as I understand, you can't do that in KDE.]

I like that the MX Devs default to a vertical panel, I just think they have the Panel upside down for efficient workflow. For example, most apps have the menu bar at the top (horizontal). Your cursor is often going to be at the top of the screen. It makes sense to me that the Panel should have the most clicked on icons at the top, too. See the attachment.

My Panel, below, is shown with the Menu open and no open apps, whose icons would show up under the Workspaces.

Screenshot.jpg

[m_pav]

For me, it's always the vertical panel in deskbar mode. I've yet to see a single webpage, website or any other human produced document, excepting video and/or photos that look better proportioned on the display when using a horizontal panel.

Taking our default 35-pixel row size for the panel and comparing its screen real-estate usage on a 16:9 1366x768 display, the consumption is 1.78% greater when it is placed horizontally.

A vertical panel consumes 2.56% of usable pixels
A horizontal panel consumes 4.55% of usable pixels

To fill a screen with vertical panels, you would need roughly 39
To fill a screen with horizontal panels, you would need roughly 22 - That's gotta tell you something about efficiency.

The stats are different on higher resolution displays, but the evidence is clear, a horizontal panel is significantly less display friendly than a vertical panel when the same row size is used.

MX was originally produced for Netbooks with a pathetic display resolution of 1024x600, and the vertical panel was used to make the most of very limited screen real-estate. Despite the massive difference with modern systems, the screen real-estate usage is still in favour of a vertical panel no matter the screen resolution. Microsoft has done a serious dis-service to every user in the world by sticking with their space-hogging horizontal panel and they've doubled the encumbrance when a second display is added by smashing a second panel on the second screen.

Their folly has spilled over and infected users of greater systems! Shame on them!

[asqwerth]

... I do actually hate the default Gnome setup when using Fedora. I never did get used to that paradigm. ....

Seaken64

That's why on my Fedora install, I have the Dash to Dock extension to make the hidden Favourites bar become a vertical dock. Once that's sorted, it becomes the normal vertical panel/dock paradigm, just like in MX.

In my MX installs, my top left corner calls up skippy-xd, while the top right calls up xfdashboard, so it's again similar to the Gnome top left corner calling up the windows overview. [OK, that's just for some of my MX installs. The rest use Compiz for the windows overview hot corners]

[Rudy_Kaos]

I've used vertical layouts since LiteStep back in the 90s long before widescreens and have never looked back. My wife runs vertical on Win7. I love Deskbar mode in XFCE, running Adapta-Nokto.

[linexer2016]

I personally do not like vertical bars. I am more than happy with a horizontal bar placed at the bottom of my XFCE desktops. I do have a 34" screen though and maybe that's why the relatively small HB doesn't intrude overly into my workspaces. That said, I also run XFCE on a separate machine which utilises just a 24" screen and again, no issues with the placement or sizing of the HB. It probably is another thing that personal preference really comes to the fore. For me, I just never warmed to having what I see as my main work area (even if that work area is mainly given over to a nice wallpaper and a conky) being cluttered up with a menu bar in the vertical orientation.

[bwhawk]

That's only because we're used to Windows. If they'd used a vertical panel on one side from Windows 95 on we'd all think that horizontal panels look ugly. It reminds me of a story: some behavioral scientists were doing an experiment. They had a room with six gorillas in it. They lowered a bunch of bananas down and as soon as the gorillas tried to get the bananas the fire sprinklers were turned on. Pretty soon none of the gorillas would touch the bananas when they were lowered down. Then they removed one gorilla and replaced it with a new one. When the bananas were lowered the new gorilla tried to eat them and the other gorillas stopped him. This went on, replacing one gorilla at a time until none of the gorillas had ever had the sprinklers turned on on them yet none of them would ever touch the bananas. They didn't even know why, it was just the way they'd always done it.

That may be apocryphal.

[JayM]

That's only because we're used to Windows. If they'd used a vertical panel on one side from Windows 95 on we'd all think that horizontal panels look ugly. It reminds me of a story: some behavioral scientists were doing an experiment. They had a room with six gorillas in it. They lowered a bunch of bananas down and as soon as the gorillas tried to get the bananas the fire sprinklers were turned on. Pretty soon none of the gorillas would touch the bananas when they were lowered down. Then they removed one gorilla and replaced it with a new one. When the bananas were lowered the new gorilla tried to eat them and the other gorillas stopped him. This went on, replacing one gorilla at a time until none of the gorillas had ever had the sprinklers turned on on them yet none of them would ever touch the bananas. They didn't even know why, it was just the way they'd always done it.

That may be apocryphal.

I'm sure it is. That's why I said it was a story.

[OKie]

I posted a bug report with xfce-panel-profiles: https://gitlab.xfce.org/apps/xfce4-pane ... /issues/20 . It looks like a python/non-ascii character bug, if anyone here is a python programmer and has some time, it will probably yield to a few hours of work.

If you have any influence with the XFCE people, it would be nice to get this working. It "should" allow people to share their panel configurations, which would be much nicer than just sharing pictures.

Since people are now arguing "for" and "against", I would like to say that 35 years of having things at the bottom of terminals and windows (X, Mac (top mostly), and M$) have given me a sort of motor memory. The mouse flick to the bottom or top of a screen seems easier and more reliable than a flick to the far left. I've been taking full advantage of the XFCE auto-resizing option, and I regularly split my screen between two windows. So, I think the wasted space argument has less appeal.

I'm going to spend some time thinking about deskbar. It would be nice if you could pull them up and down with hotkeys.

[GuiGuy]

For me, it's always the vertical panel in deskbar mode. I've yet to see a single webpage, website or any other human produced document, excepting video and/or photos that look better proportioned on the display when using a horizontal panel.

Taking our default 35-pixel row size for the panel and comparing its screen real-estate usage on a 16:9 1366x768 display, the consumption is 1.78% greater when it is placed horizontally.

A vertical panel consumes 2.56% of usable pixels
A horizontal panel consumes 4.55% of usable pixels

To fill a screen with vertical panels, you would need roughly 39
To fill a screen with horizontal panels, you would need roughly 22 - That's gotta tell you something about efficiency.

The stats are different on higher resolution displays, but the evidence is clear, a horizontal panel is significantly less display friendly than a vertical panel when the same row size is used.

MX was originally produced for Netbooks with a pathetic display resolution of 1024x600, and the vertical panel was used to make the most of very limited screen real-estate. Despite the massive difference with modern systems, the screen real-estate usage is still in favour of a vertical panel no matter the screen resolution. Microsoft has done a serious dis-service to every user in the world by sticking with their space-hogging horizontal panel and they've doubled the encumbrance when a second display is added by smashing a second panel on the second screen.

Their folly has spilled over and infected users of greater systems! Shame on them!

+1