Hi,
I used to be a big fan of GNOME the way it got out of my way when I didn’t need it and no icons in the bottom to take up desktop space. But the top bar just seems so… useless. It holds a few useful icons in the right side (and you can get extensions to add more) but other than this, it’s just taking up space. After a trip past Xfce I’m now on KDE with the bar in the top.
Have I missed anything about the top bar in GNOME Desktop?
The bar is meant to be very minimal and not distracting.
It takes up space, sure, but it’s close to the minimal height while still having easily readable time up top
Install an extension to hide it, I just tried this and it works for me: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/545/hide-top-bar/
You can install extensions by searching for it in the GNOME extensions manager. Once installed, you can edit the settings in the same place (I found I had to move off the window to another application before hiding was applied).
I don’t use gnome and after switching to hyperland prefer not to have my compositor draw anything other than windows, so I can understand where you’re coming from, but for gnome i’d want to keep it, namely cause its used for:
- System controls including power/logout are there as well as switching audio devices through an extension.
- clock
- system indicators (what else are you going to do about applications that unmap their window on close, like discord?)
Yeah, it used to be a real space saver back in the Unity days were Window Controls and the Application Menu would merge onto the top bar when maximised but that’s dead now, I don’t get it either
For me Gnome and its GDK4 widgets feels like waisting space. Also many window title bars, button sizes and margins are way to big for me.
I just use the “Just perfection” extension to hide to top bar and only make it visible in overview. It may sound annoying to have to use overwiew each time you want to see or interact with the top bar, but honestly for me it’s not that often to make that 1 or 2 extra keypresses annoying. When you get used to it it saves a lot of space.
Agreed 100%
Twice as bad when you have a VM running Gnome open inside Gnome host machine.
There should be a simple Tweaks option “hide Gnome titlebar” or better yet a per-window preference setting
Gnome is designed to mimic MacOS, and the top bar is a fixture there. KDE is designed to mimic Windows, but also lets you configure way more than Windows ever did. You can put it on top in KDE and tell it to hide when not in use, if you want.
It mimics macOS, however, on the Mac, Apple has got every app (all the ones I use, anyway) to use the top bar for menus, meaning that it is less wasted space. But I don’t really like macOS app/window handling.
I guess it depends on your use, for me it’s sometimes too small. I use it for
- workspaces
- ram + cpu + network speed monitoring
- clipboard manager icon
- music controls
- all background running apps (nextcloud, keepass, …)
Know that you can make the panel thinner or remove it completely with the extension “Just perfection”. I highly recommend it as it does a ton of useful stuff and is always updated on time with new Gnome versions.
I had to use my old .ml account because of the Cloudflare outage. Shame on Dessalines, fascist tankie.
