I actually had to go find a video on how Gnome 3 was meant to be used. Every time I installed it, I would always go straight to the tweak tool to add in some functionality. Then one day I was like, no, there has to be a design here, what is it? It actually took a fair bit of effort to find.
Not long ago I was watching someone from Red Hat doing some work in Fedora and saw him use Gnome as designed, pop open the stage, move his window to another desktop to get it out of the way, and then go back to what he was doing. It was fairly quick when he did it, but it seems awkward. Had I not previous done the research in Gnome I would have found his actions there very odd.
I’ve always been a Gnome guy when it comes to Linux, and have been using macOS for a long time. So when Gnome 3 came out I figured it would be great for going between macOS and Linux. But I’m almost at the point where I’m willing to give KDE another shot, even though I’m not really a fan of the start-menu style interface. I know there are panels or apps I could use to simulate a dock, but I always found the add-on docks that are just launchers to kind of suck, since the system really wasn’t designed around them. I’m not sure of modem KDE has other better options. It’s been a long time.
Are they rich enough to be the only widget/panel? That has been my issue in the past. I couldn’t just have the dock, I always needed something else to fall back to for when the dock had issues or didn’t support a critical function.
It’s been working great for me. What do you need it to do? Mine is just like the MacOS dock: it has shortcuts on the left side and opened programs on the right side.
I’m trying to think back to my last attempt. I think it was certain OS functions, like shutdown and reboot, needed some other panel. On macOS those are in the menu bar, which is a key part of the OS. On Linux I had an extra panel that didn’t feel like it was part of the OS, it felt more like this extra thing of mostly wasted space, so I could pretend the desktop environment was designed differently than it actually was. It didn’t feel much different than running a dock app on Windows, and still needing the start menu and taskbar.
You can create a MacOS style top panel in KDE, and then add whatever widgets you want to it. It’s called an “application menu bar”. Just right-click on the desktop, then choose Application Menu Bar from the Add Panel menu.
On Linux I had an extra panel that didn’t feel like it was part of the OS, it felt more like this extra thing of mostly wasted space, so I could pretend the desktop environment was designed differently than it actually was. It didn’t feel much different than running a dock app on Windows, and still needing the start menu and taskbar.
You can add any widget to any panel. There’s no need for wasted space, because you can move stuff around as much as you want.
I use two panels, because adding additional widgets to my dock makes it too cluttered. So, I have a dock at the bottom of the screen, and another panel on the left-hand side with an application menu (which includes Restart, Shutdown, Lock, etc.), a clock, and a system tray (which handles mounting/unmounting drives, Bluetooth connections, volume, and so on). They’re both set to “auto-hide” visibility so that they’re out of the way when I’m not using them.
Thanks. I’ll probably give it another shot. I think last time I tried there was a lot of inconsistency around if the application menu would move up to the top of the screen to stay with the app. I assume that’s been improved over the years.
I actually had to go find a video on how Gnome 3 was meant to be used. Every time I installed it, I would always go straight to the tweak tool to add in some functionality. Then one day I was like, no, there has to be a design here, what is it? It actually took a fair bit of effort to find.
Not long ago I was watching someone from Red Hat doing some work in Fedora and saw him use Gnome as designed, pop open the stage, move his window to another desktop to get it out of the way, and then go back to what he was doing. It was fairly quick when he did it, but it seems awkward. Had I not previous done the research in Gnome I would have found his actions there very odd.
I’ve always been a Gnome guy when it comes to Linux, and have been using macOS for a long time. So when Gnome 3 came out I figured it would be great for going between macOS and Linux. But I’m almost at the point where I’m willing to give KDE another shot, even though I’m not really a fan of the start-menu style interface. I know there are panels or apps I could use to simulate a dock, but I always found the add-on docks that are just launchers to kind of suck, since the system really wasn’t designed around them. I’m not sure of modem KDE has other better options. It’s been a long time.
KDE has docks. It’s just another Plasmoid (i.e. a desktop widget). It’s not as smooth as MacOS’s, but it looks decent and gets the job done.
Are they rich enough to be the only widget/panel? That has been my issue in the past. I couldn’t just have the dock, I always needed something else to fall back to for when the dock had issues or didn’t support a critical function.
It’s been working great for me. What do you need it to do? Mine is just like the MacOS dock: it has shortcuts on the left side and opened programs on the right side.
I’m trying to think back to my last attempt. I think it was certain OS functions, like shutdown and reboot, needed some other panel. On macOS those are in the menu bar, which is a key part of the OS. On Linux I had an extra panel that didn’t feel like it was part of the OS, it felt more like this extra thing of mostly wasted space, so I could pretend the desktop environment was designed differently than it actually was. It didn’t feel much different than running a dock app on Windows, and still needing the start menu and taskbar.
You can create a MacOS style top panel in KDE, and then add whatever widgets you want to it. It’s called an “application menu bar”. Just right-click on the desktop, then choose Application Menu Bar from the Add Panel menu.
You can add any widget to any panel. There’s no need for wasted space, because you can move stuff around as much as you want.
I use two panels, because adding additional widgets to my dock makes it too cluttered. So, I have a dock at the bottom of the screen, and another panel on the left-hand side with an application menu (which includes Restart, Shutdown, Lock, etc.), a clock, and a system tray (which handles mounting/unmounting drives, Bluetooth connections, volume, and so on). They’re both set to “auto-hide” visibility so that they’re out of the way when I’m not using them.
Thanks. I’ll probably give it another shot. I think last time I tried there was a lot of inconsistency around if the application menu would move up to the top of the screen to stay with the app. I assume that’s been improved over the years.