Could you use your WM without any Taskbar ?
 

HI,

Is a taskbar really necessary, such as kicker, tint2, ... gnome-panel? Could you use your WM without any Taskbar ?

If yes, please explain how or better give us a cool screenshot of your high-tech desktop.

thanks!

No, I need a taskbar, I don't see any reason not to have one.

Without taskbar it might be possible with some wm like wmmaker

I use openbox. I would be lost without any taskbar. Usually I have windows everywhere onto my screen, or maybe I should use more those 4 workspaces...

I'm not even sure what your question means! The taskbar is defined as a bar used to launch and monitor running applications (Wikipedia). Kicker and the Gnome panel contain a taskbar, but they are panels. So which do you mean, panel or taskbar? I've never used a taskbar, but I must have a panel for the pager, to say nothing of knowing what the time is and which alphabet I'm going to be typing with.

bar such as kicker, tint2, ... gnome-panel

I have been using WindowMaker for years without a taskbar, so yes :)

I use three gnome panels.

The top one is all about notifications and information.
The bottom one is all about menu, window list, date/time and shutdown switch
The right-side one has small icons for my dozen or so most-use programs.

I do not want or use any other docks or unity or anything. the rest of my desktop is blank except for background and running windows.

No, I could not live without these panels, nor could I live without the traditional menu.

so much panels. Interesting. would you have a screenshot?

Could I live without a panel/taskbar? Yes. My desktop menu contains all the applications and I can hit Alt+Tab so it's entirely possible.
Would I want to? No.
I only have one panel at the top of the screen and it lists running programs, houses the main menu and provides notifications and time display. For the space a panel takes up it's handy to have.
However, if my pattern of use were a little different on my netbook I might choose Ratpoison which has no panels or window borders/decorations.

It's very unobtrusive and low-key. In my 12.04-with-MATE experimental system I have the right panel self-hiding, which gives me problems in 11.04. You could guess you'd see the narwhals if there were no programs open.

Attachment 10747

The careful use of colour and transparency makes it even more low-key.

You can guess that I moved from WinXP to Ubuntu 10.04, and thought, "I can do the same familiar stuff --- and a lot more!"

fvwm2, no taskbar, just a simple look

http://home.comcast.net/~j_mccue/issue/fvwm_01.jpg

That's using more space than a real panel would!
http://img694.imageshack.us/img694/7168/desktopoq.png

What can I say, I like the IconBox :)
Nice setup though.

John

The WMs I use, blackbox and recently i3, don't have a taskbar, so I'm living without one for quite some time now (since Slackware 13.0 with kde 4 was released). :)

Not a problem for me. I do use i3status bar but I could do without it. At the moment it looks like that:
http://www.slackword.net/files/img/task.png

I auto-hide a stripped down pannel in both KDE and Gnome and use a pop-up Cairo-dock for most functions that one would ordinarily use the panel for...

On my touch screen x86 boxes, I add a second Cairo-dock dock in the upper area for launching on-screen keyboards and doing things like rotation...

You really use this Desktop. It is very simple Desktop. You like it?

I use Xmonad (a tiling WM) with no taskbar and multiple monitors. I just leave it in fullscreen mode (one app per monitor) and switch between apps quickly with keyboard shortcuts. There is no taskbar or status bar or anything else... just the windows.

I like having a panel, but if I could use kwin with something that I could access launchers from like nautilus or something, I think I could live quite comfortably with the expose effect enabled.

Yes, I tend bounce between vtwm and fvwm2, but once I figured out how to configure FvwmIconBox I tend to stick with that "desktop" most of the time. Note, that look is quite close to mwm (xwinman.org), but the keyboard accelerators are different.

Regards,
John

I use dwm which has no taskbar. I don't miss it. I normally only have one application per tag (workspace) anyway.

Im using tint2 with Openbox, and the one that comes with Blackbox, but back in the day when I start with GNU/Linux the WM in my computer was WindowMaker so no bars, in some of my old machines i have Wmii or Dwm which has no task bar, kicker or panels.
I could live w/o any of them, handy but not really necessary.

Regards

Anyone like the new type of taskbar offered by Windows 7?

I wouldn't call that new, it pretty much resembles what AWN does. But no, I don't like it, but I don't like this type of panel anyways.
I use i3 with the statusbar, showing my the workspaces in use, so that I don't miss urgency hints and for showing my systray icons. the rest of the bar is filled by Conky with the usual statistics, like CPU usage, network traffic and so on.

http://imageshack.us/a/img7/6091/scr...0201206594.png

nice shot. i3 looks nice http://i3wm.org/screenshots/

Have you tried dwm? Why the choice for i3 wm?

Yes, I have tried dwm, but I don't like it.
I also have tried awesome, Xmonad and wmii, but found that i3 is the WM that is exactly what I want:
- very flexible layout
- easy configurable with textfiles instead of having to learn Lua or Haskell (wmii is at least configurable using Bash scripts)
- in-place restart of the WM if you have changed the configuration, so that your running applications are not affected
- filter rules for which application to start on which workspace and named workspaces
- very helpful developer (answers most of the time within a day when I file a bugreport or post to the very active mailing list)
- and more that doesn't I forget now

I'd also add:
- excellent multi-monitor support
- emacs-style modes allowing for mode-specific keybindings
- the scratchpad feature

I use KDE, with 4 panels, 3 of which are hidden. screenshot here. I don't go to the taskbar very often, all the apps I need I launch using krunner, window switching done with alt+tab. The taskbar is there mostly in case an app wants to notify of some event (more like persistent notifications).

Serafean

Hi
I think the taskbar is really necessary. I choose no. :)

[I] use 3 panels in gnome calssic and 99% of what I need to open is one click away . A lot faster than typing in launcher or digging through menus

Depends on the launcher. I use dmenu and the app I want is usually no more than 3 key-presses away, and I don't have to dedicate valuable screen space on toolbars. But each to their own. Tobi prefers i3 over dwn, I prefer dwm over i3, you prefer to click little pictures. It's all personal preference, and there is no right answer.

FVWM can do this pretty easily. The real trick is to set your mouse buttons to do such things as lower and raise windows depending on which button you clicked the window border with, that way you can find things which your big, maximized window is probably obscuring.

Tiling WMs also do this, but you will miss a bar at the bottom to help keep track of your virtual desktops and tray buttons and probably your conky output. Find one that let's you hide the bar with a keyboard shortcut so you only have to see it when you want.

Docks want to replace the taskbar, but they're clumsy by design. How do you open more than one program, and then how do you figure out which one it brings to focus when you click on the singular icon? If you could limit every program to 1 and use tabs it would work, but that's a *lot* of policy to make something work the right way.

You might also use any WM that let's you roll up or shade windows, but I can't recommend that too much. Sooner or later you'll overlap the title bars and be totally lost.

I think the taskbar is one of our best metaphors on the desktop. It's not pretty, but it does do a lot of useful stuff that isn't available anywhere else.