Hi,
I used to be a big fan of GNOME the way it got out of my way when I didn’t need it and no icons in the bottom to take up desktop space. But the top bar just seems so… useless. It holds a few useful icons in the right side (and you can get extensions to add more) but other than this, it’s just taking up space. After a trip past Xfce I’m now on KDE with the bar in the top.
Have I missed anything about the top bar in GNOME Desktop?
The top bar shows you:
- Date and time
- What workspace you’re in
- What apps you’re actively running
- Internet connection
- If Caffeine is running
These are all important information to have at a glance, in my opinion. If you don’t think so, you can remove it. Simple as.
These are all important information to have at a glance, in my opinion. If you don’t think so, you can remove it. Simple as.
it would be better if you could autohide it. especially for low res screens like mine.
Theres a gnome extension for that
gnome-tweaks used to be able to do this, but not anymore.
which one do you know about?
Okay, I missed the part where it can show me the apps I’m using. Where do I turn it on?
The bar is meant to be very minimal and not distracting.
It takes up space, sure, but it’s close to the minimal height while still having easily readable time up top
Install an extension to hide it, I just tried this and it works for me: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/545/hide-top-bar/
You can install extensions by searching for it in the GNOME extensions manager. Once installed, you can edit the settings in the same place (I found I had to move off the window to another application before hiding was applied).
When I first started using GNOME the top bar was a bit off-putting but I got used to it TBH. It’s not something I think about much nowadays.
However, you actually can move it to the side or to the bottom, and/or change it in other ways, with the dash-to-panel extension so definitely check that out if the top bar is bugging you https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1160/dash-to-panel/
Gnome is designed to mimic MacOS, and the top bar is a fixture there. KDE is designed to mimic Windows, but also lets you configure way more than Windows ever did. You can put it on top in KDE and tell it to hide when not in use, if you want.
It mimics macOS, however, on the Mac, Apple has got every app (all the ones I use, anyway) to use the top bar for menus, meaning that it is less wasted space. But I don’t really like macOS app/window handling.
I don’t use gnome and after switching to hyperland prefer not to have my compositor draw anything other than windows, so I can understand where you’re coming from, but for gnome i’d want to keep it, namely cause its used for:
- System controls including power/logout are there as well as switching audio devices through an extension.
- clock
- system indicators (what else are you going to do about applications that unmap their window on close, like discord?)
It’s a nice place to put System-Monitor and fréon extensions
Removed by mod
Agreed 100%
Twice as bad when you have a VM running Gnome open inside Gnome host machine.
There should be a simple Tweaks option “hide Gnome titlebar” or better yet a per-window preference setting
Gnome Devs: No, you are wrong
It’s almost as if every DE has their own design philosophy they stick to. The minority of loud, hateful circlejerking around GNOME developers because the DE doesn’t fit arbitrary personal preferences is so bizarre.
This ain’t Windows or macOS. You can install a whole new DE that looks how you want and provides all the niche customization options you want. And here’s the kicker: you can do that and simply stop caring about GNOME at all, even to the point you don’t feel like leaving comments like this.
Or like, fork GNOME. All the energy spent devaluing the work of — in many cases unpaid — hobbyist contributors is a bit sick at this point. At points it’s devolved into direct harassment of individuals. And yet, nobody has bothered to fork GNOME. It’s toxic freak behaviour and we shouldn’t be accepting this as the norm in open source.
It’s why I favored Unity over Gnome back in the day. The titlebar/basic menu items and close/minimize/expand buttons integrated into the top bar was better. Ya it was probably a copy of MacOS/OSX. Damn good to me in my opinion though. Overall I like Gnome but I’m not sold on it long term. Someday I may try going full time on KDE again. Very likely popos 26.04 with Cosmic I’ll try that out on my primary computer when it releases
Thank you - I will try to look into this as it looks nice in the screenshots.
There are a lot of settings to change its behavior and appearance too.
One solution is to replace the panel and dock with something like the Dash to Panel extension. It consolidates both into a single bar/dock/panel, is highly configurable and works very well. I wanted to get rid of the top panel for your reason as well as my muscle memory wanting the window controls of maximized windows to be on the top of my screen, not below a what essentially is a menu bar.
I use an Extension that can show the output of shell scripts in the bar to monitor different things about my system like CPU/RAM/Swap/Network usage and some more things I just want to keep an eye on like distrobox status.
I also used the OpenBar extension to move the bar to the bottom and do color customisations for the system and notification menus.
For me Gnome and its GDK4 widgets feels like waisting space. Also many window title bars, button sizes and margins are way to big for me.
I just use the “Just perfection” extension to hide to top bar and only make it visible in overview. It may sound annoying to have to use overwiew each time you want to see or interact with the top bar, but honestly for me it’s not that often to make that 1 or 2 extra keypresses annoying. When you get used to it it saves a lot of space.
