Beware of trying lxpanel as a replacement of tint2 in a standalone Openbox session

Maybe one can get totally used to it, but the in-between/trying out can be annoyingly troublesome.

Despite not having a bug found on tint2 (unhidden auto-hiding panels being covered/"popping-under" always-on-top windows, instead of above), it doesn't feel the same in a significant way, but I could get over it.

Unfortunately, besides that, the auto-hide mode seems to behave erratically. Not only delays a bit too much to show up, but often seems to just not show for a while, needs a few tries. Which is way worse than being consistent in its bugs and features, like tint2.

But not only that, at some point somehow it made openbox have its virtual desktops set up in a vertical orientation. I don't quite recall how I found that was what happened. I thought it had messed OB's rc.xml config regarding key and mouse-bindings dealing with moving windows from one desktop to the next, but it seemed unaltered in this regard. Oh, yeah, I recall now. With alt+tab the virtual desktop "squares" were all of a sudden aligned vertically, that was the tell-tale sign. Then I could/need to drag windows up and down, correspondingly, to move them from one desktop to another. Weirdly, the "move to next desktop" mosebinding associated with the mouse wheel being rolled up did nothing, rather than work "vertically." I guess besides desktop "next"/"previous" one maybe would need to have change some OB rc.xml setting to something like above/updesktop and below/downdesktop specifically. But I don't care to find out.

I don't even get what setting, and where, was changed. In lxpanel's own settings, it didn't have anything obvious in this regard. Whether the GUI settings or the config files I've found. And openbox didn't seem to have been changed in anything as well. Although one of lxpanel's config GUI options would take me to obconf-qt, but even there, there was nothing regarding this virtual vertical/horizontal alignment of desktops. Maybe it would be in obconf-gtk.

Whatever is the case, I ended up having to remove lxpanel from the autostart and logging out and in again, for the normal state of things to be restored. Only killing it and restarting openbox itself (openbox --restart) didn't work, which is rather puzzling. I can understand just "reconfigure" not restoring things, but not even "restart"? I wonder what lxpanel did, probably some weird left-over environment variables never cleaned up or restored by OB.


Ah, the in-between of things also had it working in a ridiculous "strut" mode, resizing/pushing down windows on hide/autohide (maybe not so bad for horizontal panels, but I wanted a taller/narrower vertical setup), when for all that I could tell, any setting would have defined otherwise. Oddly enough, this "behavior" only showed up after the first re-login with lxpanel on autostart, while it was working fine, as I'd have wanted, the first time I tried just running it on xterm. But even after fixing that thing somehow, there still was that problem of randomly failing to show up, and being some hundreds of milliseconds slower even when it did show up.