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

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