Comparing taskbars & desktop panels, & musing on the One True Linux Way...

I am not a huge fan of the Windows-type desktop, but I will use it happily enough.

This is good, because there's a wide choice of them. However, I like my taskbar to be vertical, and most Windows-like desktops can't do that. When I say so, people often respond something like "but $desktop_x does vertical panels just fine!"

I get that a lot. So often I assembled an Imgur picture album to show what I mean.

The taskbar was an original invention in Windows 95. There is no prior art; I and others have looked. The closest were the "icon bar" in Acorn RISC OS (1987) and the Dock in NeXTstep (1988). Both are simpler.

The way the taskbar works is that whatever its orientation, its contents run right-to-left.

So you have the Start button, then (as of IE4's Active Desktop) an optional "quick launch" toolbar (still there in Win8 and Win10 but off by default), then buttons for all the open windows/apps, then the "system tray" or "notification area" containing status icons and the clock.

Wherever you put the taskbar — bottom, top, vertical on the left, vertical on the right — the icons in the system tray and quicklaunch run left to right, in rows if there isn't enough space.

Buttons have text running left to right. (R to L if you use Arabic, Hebrew etc.)

Buttons are wider than they are tall. (This is harder to see in Win7/8/10 because they don't contain text by default any more).

In a taskbar, as you resize the panel, you get more or fewer rows of icons. More or fewer buttons may fit. If it is so narrow there's only room for 1 icon, then they form a column.

This is good, because it means that on a widescreen, you get more room if the panel gets wider. You get more icons, more buttons, but they stay the same size — there is a "large icons"/"small icons" setting and it is honoured. I normally adjust mine for 4 columns of status icons, which gives me window buttons about the same size as the old traditional ones on Win9x/2K/XP.

In GNOME 2, MATE, Cinnamon, et al, the contents of a panel are arranged in the direction that the panel is arranged. So if you place the taskbar vertically, the contents run vertically. No rows or columns; just a single column. This is bad, because your status icons take up much of the panel leaving little room for window buttons.

If you resize the panel, some or all of the contents get bigger or smaller. So for example in KDE (3/4/5, doesn't matter, they all do vertical taskbars but badly), you get a HUGE start button because it's not resizable: it fits the width of the panel. You get a HUGE clock as well because there's no size setting. There are a million settings for where the panel is, how it's rendered, and how the file manager can display email, network shares, the entire Web and connect to some network protocol nobody's used in 3 decades, but you can't set the font size of the clock. Why would you want to do that?

GNOME 2 and MATE show some things vertically, and some horizontally. Just vertically is bad, but a mixture is even worse — you get the worst of both worlds, showing few things but some look weird or take a lot of room.

In the original Windows taskbar, if you make it really thick in a horizontal orientation, you get 2 rows of app buttons — and even 3 or 4 if it's big enough.

If the GNOME 2/MATE/Cinnamon ones did that in vertical orientation, it would help, but no, they don't implement that feature.

In other words, what annoys me is that almost every FOSS desktop out there is a copy of Win95. KDE (all versions); GNOME 2 & MATE; Cinnamon; XFCE; LXDE/LXQt; Enlightenment; Lumina.

But most of them are rubbish rip-offs of the Windows desktop, and they can't even do all the things the original could 26 years ago when version 1.0 of it shipped.

Xfce does it fairly well. It's a bit clunky but it works. LXDE and LXQt do it well too, but they're much less customisable.

I know of 3 current FOSS desktops that aren't Win95 ripoffs. GNOME 3 is its own thing (with heavy influence from Ubuntu Unity, which in turn is a rip-off of Mac OS X.) Pantheon (the Elementary OS desktop) is a — very poor — rip off of Mac OS X. Pretty, though. (PearOS was a good rip-off; Apple bought it and shut it down. Pantheon doesn't even have a menu bar, just an empty panel where it used to be. I've blogged about that before.) Budgie doesn't quite know what it is, but you can do the exact same thing with about 5min of customising Xfce with its built-in themes and controls.

(The ROX Desktop wasn't but it's basically dead, sadly. GNUstep isn't a desktop, they just implemented one by accident. It's a NeXTstep ripoff. There were long long ago ripoffs of Classic MacOS ("Sparta") and AmigaOS (amiwm + some file manager I forget.) All disappeared last century.)

OpenCDE isn't but despite an epic amount of work to get it made FOSS by a mate of mine, nobody seems to care and it hasn't been modernized or even adopted. Sad, really. It wouldn't be a vast amount of work to make it into a decent OS/2 Warp Workplace Shell clone, and a lot of people loved that.

It's the Linux way, isn't it? What we will do is, we'll divide into a dozen different groups that hate each other's guts. Three quarters of them will duplicate each other's work, badly, based on a rip-off of someone else's idea. Two of the others will rip-off a different idea instead. And one lunatic will do something totally different and new, half-finish it, get bored and go off and do something else which they also won't finish.

Meanwhile, the hardcore will use something horrible from 1973 but love it to death, proclaim how powerful it is and refuse to use anything more modern.

For bonus points, they'll pick one tool from 1973 and another tool from 1965 and despise each other for using the wrong one.

And repeat.

Meanwhile, most practical people with jobs just go and buy a Macbook.