Hi all,
After recovering for a few months in the soothing arms of KDE Plasma from the shock of my first meeting with His Royal Ugliness Sir GNOME I recently dared to look at it again safely in a virtual box. Encouraged, I consecutively made Budgie’s and Pantheon’s acquaintance. And I learned some lessons from them. The first lesson, I´d like to stay on Plasma. Plasma gives me some sense of freedom to adapt my DE to my convenience. As KDE Plasma is the most customisable from hear-say (ie, read-write). The second lesson, the GNOME department manages to get out of the way of the user and stay out of the way pretty well and I’d like to incorporate that in Plasma and bring that to an even higher level than GNOME.
I am not fond of a windows like taskbar either auto hide or constantly visible. I am also not fond of a bottom dock which requires a lot of mouse travel to command.
What I do like is tiling windows and I like a top dock only. And I also like to be in full control of when this dock must appear. Finally I´d rather use as much of my laptop’s screen real estate for the running applications and waste as least as possible to desktop management / peripherals.
My ideal configuration when running multiple (tiled) windows would be something like a top bar (panel) giving me access to app launcher, clock, battery and not much else.
When running an application maximised, I’d like to see no panel at all. The title bar should include the clock, battery and app launcher / taskbar. The latter should provide easy access to applications, running applications, system tray and notification area.
What would be a good entry point where I can get guidance on making such changes to my plasma config?