Comment by jeroenhd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jeroenhd | Hacker News Reader

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Auto-hide the task bar at the bottom, and you've basically got the Gnome UI. Works just fine. It's the permanent screen reservation of the double task bar that really eats up the usable desk space.

Samsung's task bar (when you enable the DeX integration on a tablet) also supports this and it makes for a fine user experience.

Edit: I've enabled "force desktop mode" on my Pixel 9 Pro and hooked it up to my laptop dock. The UI looks almost exactly the same already. Taskbar at the bottom, notification bar at the top.

It's clearly experimental; my ultrawide screen scales horribly, my keyboard app gets horribly confused, and interacting with the top bar triggers a full-screen tablet overlay that looks a bit weird.

However, Chrome opens multiple windows and browses just fine. There are right-click menus, mouse hover interactions, window resizing features (though some apps require the "force resizable activities" flag). Ethernet Just Works, audio/video just works, and I can operate my phone screen while working in dock mode (so apps that absolutely refuse to work can still be operated through the touch screen).

Hiding the bottom bar doesn't solve the problem because it still takes the corners away. You can't put UI there because the bottom bar will come up and cover it when you mouse into the corner. The OS is taking all four corners for itself. Greedy! Apps should have that space. Apps are what we are here to use and the OS is getting in the way.

macOS doesn't seem to care and that's what all the designers use. I'm guessing people think it's pretty?

The dock would also better if it weren't stretched to the entire screen width by default but perhaps Google is planning to use that space for something. It's also possible they're going to remove the top bar at some point, that'd make the UI standard Windows-shaped.

The Gnome trick for the dock is to only show the dock when hitting the Super button which also brings up the virtual desktops and what macOS might call Launchpad (except not full screen by default). Ubuntu likes to force the dock on you the way macOS does, but you can disable that.

macOS provides enough utility in the menu bar to justify having it (unified menu -- unlike the Android UI shown in the article).

MacOS is stuck in the past with the top menu and Dock. I don't think they're brave enough to change anything now.

Only designers earning US like wages.

Designers in the remaining 80% of the computing world have to do with what is available.

Inexplicably, Samsung removed the ability to hide the taskbar with One UI 8 last year.

They rebuilt DeX on Google's desktop codebase. So obviously a lot of features were lost. Hopefully what we'll gain is wider app support.

My previous Pixel (a 4a) had problems with getting unduly warm. I've heard it's better on later models but still not solved. How has your 9 Pro done with heat?

I haven't noticed much. It can get hot when I'm taxing it (i.e. running large LLMs), but it takes a lot for the rather underpowered Tensor SoC to get warm.

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