Why does every window manager have panels? I don't want any. I only want tiling and have every thing traditionally handled with panels to be a separate app I can launch the common way and place as an ordinary window wherever I see fit.
It's especially annoying in the world of tiling window managers. There are few options for a desktop environment with a solid tiling WM. Regolith is one (based on i3 / Sway), and I thank those who develop it, but it's patching together a bunch of independently developed tools and you can tell when you try to change some things and have to deal with disparate config files.
I think its the vim effect where the userbase just has a high demand for customization and don't mind a lot more set up and configuration to get there.
One particular problem is theming: I'd like to set a theme in a single place for all the elements of my desktop environment. Not sure if it's fair to expect a bunch of independent opinionated developers who like to use weird graphics toolkits (when not drawing everything by themselves) to come up with a unified solution.
Another problem is the shortcuts. It's the same problem in (neo)vim when you build your awesome IDE-like setup based on 53 unrelated packages: you end up with an illogical, overlapping soup of keybindings. I think you need someone to take charge of unifying things to provide a coherent experience.
a persistent window, aka panel, is the conventional way to provide that.
it's simply a conceptual extension of the 'prompt' into a gui environment. nothing has surpassed the panel concept in the past forty years that it has been dominant.
i expect the 'panel' is the primary feature vehicle of any desktop environment - they are nearly synonymous. nearly every window manager also contains support for panels, even if they are not part of a desktop environment that specifically provides them. what do you use?
As for the full screen bug you experienced, I don’t recall ever seeing that but Windows 9x had a plethora of weird bugs so it wouldn’t surprise me if you had issues.
and microsoft does all kinds of weird shit nobody has an explanation for.
Would love to see something where this was the principle? Very little philosophy or opinion on how individuals do their own desktop, emphasis on "you should be able to add and take things off easily as you want." The metaphor being, you know, an actual physical desktop. It's an EMPTY table. Put what you want on it and nothing you don't.
(Like openbox perhaps, just with a little more friendliness towards well integrated panels etc. Which might be construed as "opinion" -- but seems like most WMs FORCE a lot of the things on you)
I'm more of a 'install i3wm, change a few things in the config, done' kind of person these days.
That entire field is somewhat unserious because it conflates engineering and actual usability with fashion, and often can't distinguish between the two.
That's exactly why I'm saying focus more on the modularity.
1. Panels are fixed in place and don't have title bars etc. They're the only window type like that so you'd have to go to extra effort to make a UI to "lock" windows and unlock them or whatever.
2. If you delete the launcher then how do users start apps? Some old DEs let you right click the desktop but that's not very discoverable.
Much easier just to have settings somewhere do let you say which side (if any) you want panels on.
Really though, Windows, Gnome, Plasma, MacOS, they're all basically the same and all feel so cumbersome and limiting. Desktop metaphors have been stalled for so long, and when Apple took a shot at something new with Stage Manager they managed to downgrade the experience even further. I'm so disappointed by the state of things.