18.04 = circular login problem on system freeze

[Liam Proven]

On Sat, 21 Jul 2018 at 20:44, Little Girl <littlergirl at gmail.com> wrote:

> My mistake. I misread what you wrote and ran with it. Although now
> that I've had a chance to experiment some more with this, I think the
> orientation of the applets should be considered (and adjusted, when
> needed) no matter where they are in the panel. Even better would be
> to give the user the choice of which way to orient each applet
> independently.

[[Fumble fingers. I accidentally hit ctrl-enter.]]

No, that's fine, I absolutely understand. Unfortunately, this is the
default assumption: it's what most programmers of desktop environments
assume.

For non-critical text, vertical alignment is doable.

For instance, I quite liked the wm2 window manager, years ago:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wm2

http://www.all-day-breakfast.com/wm2/

You probably know what most of your windows are called. You need to be
able to distinguish them but the contents presumably help.

So, vertical window title bars worked for me -- and they save even
more vertical space.

Another example of a fairly common thing I encounter with FOSS desktops.

Made-up example:

"Our window manager is totally customisable! You can apply textures,
animated widgets, and more to window decorations. Anything you want!"
"Okay, cool. Can I have a vertical title bar on the left edge instead
of at the top?"
"..."
"You didn't think of that, did you? So it can't do 'anything', only
decorated top title bars, right?"
"NOBODY WANTS THAT! GO AWAY, THAT'S STUPID AND YOU'RE A DUMB TROLL!"

Vertical panels are fine. If more desktops had _properly_ modular
designs with decent vertical panel support, there wouldn't be the
profusion of dock apps. No need for a dock if you have functional
vertical panels. This is one of the things that irks me about Budgie
-- all that work and it can't do anything LXDE or Xfce can do with
their built-in panels and applets.

Both Xfce and LXDE include default setups with a top panel, à lá Mac
OS X, and a dock at left or bottom, without additional apps.

But for 23 years now, Windows has let you move the taskbar anywhere
and keep it usable, with readable, left-to-right (or R-to-L for
Semitic languages, AFAIK) contents.

BeOS did the same with its Tracker. Its default arrangement was not
"expanded", vertically, at top right -- so it appeared as a box which
grew as you launched more apps.

https://www.jfedor.org/shots/beos.png

That works too. :-)

I liked it in the 1990s, but now, with every computer I use regularly
having widescreens, they are needed more than ever.

GNOME 2 never did it right. MATE still doesn't. Cinnamon doesn't.

KDE, whose devs think it is totally customisable, does it but badly --
many components grow huge. You can't choose options like labelled or
unlabelled window buttons -- it depends on panel size.

> Interesting, and I see places where yours handle things elegantly
> that MATE doesn't.

*Nod* Thanks for that!

> Agreed, and that's as it should be. In cases where it wouldn't make
> sense, the applet shouldn't be offered, and, if present, should be
> disabled.

I can't offhand think of anything that doesn't work that way. Fly-out
submenus or panels should work. Drop-downs should still work. What
kind of thing were you thinking of?

> MATE is falling over on this in several cases. I just created a nice,
> fat panel in MATE and put lots of panel applets in it. Some of them
> behaved nicely, showing horizontally and with a pleasing size.
> Several of them were huge, too small, vertical (surprising on some of
> the text ones), and one of them didn't display everything until I
> clicked in what looked like empty space, but was actually part of the
> applet.

Yup. Just like GNOME 2 did.

> Last, but not least, the TopMenu Panel Applet fell over
> completely because it displayed horizontally, so most of it was cut
> off. It really ought to not be offered at all when a panel is
> vertical.

Ah, now, OK, that is a good example! :-)

I think the best way to handle it might be the way that the Windows
Quicklaunch bar does it. This has been disabled since WinXP but it's
still there, still works, and I use it when I have to use Win10.

http://mywindowshub.com/add-quick-launch-toolbar-windows-10/

If it has space, it shows a tray of icons (labelled or not, titled or
not, according to preference settings). But if there isn't room, it
shows the first line, or the title, and a double right chevron:

»

Click the chevron and a small fly-out panel appears with a
vertically-arranged list of labelled icons (assuming you have labels
turned on).

So a top-panel menu would just show the app's name, and when clicked,
it would behave like a context menu, vertically-arranged.

> Part of this seems like it would be an issue to be handled by the
> team that develops the panel and the rest would be individually
> handled by whoever develops the applets.

Agreed.

> Okay, I'll try this. That got me some interesting, and telling,
> results, showing that the MATE panel and applet developers will want
> to take a look at the behavior when the panel orientation changes.

Definitely.

My suggestions would be either LXDE or Xfce. Works quite well in them.
Xfce's implementation is more customisable.

> I've updated the web page above, adding in a couple of additional
> detailed experiments in which you can see the panels and applets
> falling over repeatedly in various ways.

Oh, good job! 👍

> Or at least showing what a top and bottom panel can, which it
> sometimes can't, currently.

Conceded. Just because there's nothing I use which can't work
vertically, it's still possible.

> I didn't test this, but even with the default number, I lose some of
> them just by changing to a left or right panel and I definitely do
> when changing sizes.

I will see if I can do a screenshot to show what I mean.


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