Vertical or horizontal taskbar?

[Panino]

Hello Community,

recently I decided to switch to a vertical taskbar since most of my use cases produce unnecessary left and right borders (for example documents, web pages) where more height would be desired. The problem I ran into was that I feel like the clock, battery status (in percent) and pomodoro applet are visualized very bad in vertical mode. Do you have any suggestions for solving this (refering to screenshot below)? Which taskbar setting would you choose (horizontal or vertical)? And why?



Greetings and looking forward to your opinions
Panino

[rickNS]

recently I decided to switch to a vertical taskbar since more height would be desired. The problem I ran into was that I feel like the clock, battery status (in percent) and pomodoro applet are visualized very bad in vertical mode. Do you have any suggestions ?
Which taskbar setting would you choose (horizontal or vertical)? And why?

Greetings and looking forward to your opinions
Panino

Opinions only.
Like you said some things only look sensible on a horizontal panel (taskbar) especially open windows, or the window list.
So,
1, Have the horizontal panel (bottom) auto-hide. Thus keeping all your space.
2, Have two panels, the bottom one for open windows, and clock etc., again have it auto-hide (or at least add the hide buttons to it), and have a vertical panel for your most used applications as they are all nice neat square icons.

[guythp]

Vertical for me, on the left side of the screen. My laptop is wide screen (like many now days I guess) meaning I have more space to spare at the sides of the screen that at the top/bottom.
Weirdly though the time/date on mine is on its side (I use the MATE variant of mint which may be why, I dunno)

[Panino]

Hmm I am still unsure what I prefer. I have to say, although I am not a fan of Windows, the horizointal taskbar function is defenitely more what I am looking for. Any Idea how to rebuild a similar style?

[cliffcoggin]

I have both horizontal and vertical panels, both auto hidden. I have mainly icons in the vertical panel, while the horizontal panel has icons with titles.

[matrovska]

For the date, you can try to edit it (right click, configure), and in the format put: %H:%M%n%d%n%b

I have the vertical panel on the left, and it automatically hides

date vertical Cinnamon.jpg (6.43 KiB) Viewed 415 times

[Panino]

Ohh nice, this looks a lot like the theme I am looking for! Thank you very much for the hint!

[ParaDice]

What is this heresy? Task bars should obviously be horizontal!

Seriously, though: I can see the point that monitors have more width than height, hence having a vertical task bar will cost some of the width that is readily available and none of the scarce height.

However, vertical comes with two big drawbacks:

• Most UIs are designed with horizontal task bars in mind (cf. your applet issues). Take your browser for instance: if you try to click anything on the side where the task bar is (e.g. a link, a tab, a bookmark or the "back" button) and you miss, you will start an application from your task bar instead. That's annoying!
• Vertical task bars increase mouse travel time, particularly on extreme widescreen monitors (e.g. 21:9 displays). Getting from left to right just takes (a bit) longer than getting from the top to the bottom

Therefore, it's horizontal for me.

[Panino]

These are also good points. For me these arguments are the most striking for choosing vertical or horizontal taskbar:

My personal opinion:

• Mouse travel time: + horizontal / - vertical
• Symmerty: + horizontal / - vertical
• Readability of text: + horizontal / - vertical
• Screen size usage: - horizontal / + vertical

Also generally I am not a fan of autohiding panels since I like to see the time on a quick glance and want to prevent missclicks. The opinion on the internet on this seems to tend more to the vertical taskbar where all use the argument of screen size usage.