Keeping panel on top is deliberate; I don't know what xmms/gkrellm are
doing, probably claiming to be panels. If they claim to be panels they
go on top. I think the final conclusion on wm-spec-list was that they
shouldn't claim to be panels.

See this bug for discussion
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=81551

sorry, i gonna reopen this stuff since for me as user this is A BUG in
metacity which should be rethought correctly before doing changes that
affect all other 3rd party applications outside.

scenario:

- xmms stays on top
- gkrellm stays on top
- panels stay on top
- whatever own X-UI coded application will probably stay on top

now here the scenario i choose gnome with the panels for this let's
assume i have a bottom panel and a right panel with 128 pixels (the
most possible) icons in them, now you dont seriously say this is a
good behaviour keeping these things on top. if this is meant to be a
serious behaviour of metacity then i seriously need to switch to the
broken sawfish or some other things that work as the the user expects.
i mean i run a 1152x864 resolution right now.

gkrellm bottom left, floating panel bottom right, panel middle right,
xmms and the top menu... and now where should i use my apps ?

Read the discussion on the other bug. xmms/gkrellm are bugs in those
apps afaik.

It's possible floating panels should be marked as NORMAL windows and
not DOCK, but that would be a gnome-panel bug.

Anyway, we're trying this behavior for now. Not changing it back until
it's been tried out a bit.

Ali, you should file bugs against these applications.

@Seth

well sure i gonna go and report bugs for all the apps that behaves
similar. i bet 3rd party application writers care less. this is
definately a bad behaviour right now.

oki i gonna report a bug for gnome-panel now since it behaves exactly
the same way STAYING on top of everything else. did you at least read
what i have written before ?

open a gnome panel with 128 pixel icons inside. do it at the bottom
and on the side of your desktop and report how 'usable' it is for you
to work under such conditions.

Created attachment 10305 [details]
we listen on users needs ... yeah but we don't care !!!!

get a look on this hypothetical example. let's say one is disabled...
i bet he enjoys his desktop now.

This is a highly non-standard use. Design for the standard case, not
for edge cases (but handle edge cases if you can without affecting the
middle). If you are finding a need to use large panels laying over the
desktop lets discuss why you find that useful and see if we can find a
good solution for your actual problem (rather than just making the
particular hack you use the solve the problem today feasible).

Hi, 

I'd like to back Ali up on this topic.  Having panels always show up
over other windows is *extremely* annoying.  A lot of applications
show data at the bottom of the window (specifically galeon) that you
may want to see.  Often times, windows end up underneath the panel and
this data is hidden until you move the window.  Personally, I only use
the panel at the bottom of my screen to launch applications, and I
launch applications far less often than I want to maximize my screen
realistate.  Keeping the panel underneath other windows is a nice way
to keep this screen realistate, but also benefit from using the panel
as a launcher.  On my laptop, having the panel hover over other
windows means I loose 48/768 = 6.2% of my effective screen realistate.

Have you guys tried the autohide panel?

maybe you realize one day that there are people outside that seriously
try to use GNOME daily. as if things isn't hard enough working on an
almost broken and horrible changed gnome 2.0. it's also a shame that
there are two people outside working in the usability team and make
gnome as unusable as possible and decide for 5000+ users what they
want or not.

i understand that you want to do it the 'right' way (as many other
things wants to go the right way in gnome and horrible fail) but
honestly this is a joke nothing else. you seriously want me to report
bugs for all apps that crosses my road and behaves strange with metacity ?

like saying:

"hey my name is xxx i want to infrom you about a bug for your app as i
did for 250 other apps today that it's horrible broken because you
don't support the right WMHINTS unfortunately i can't use your program
that i loved to use for the past 5 years because the brain havoc
pennington decided to do it the correct way with the only halfway
correct working windowmanager for gnome 2"

the answer would almost look like this:

"well i don't care much for gnome because i don't use it. so i don't
care much if the app works on your system or not."

you know that there are a shitload of apps outside that may break with
the 'correct' behaviour of metacity today so you need to reconsider
and think about what's needfull and what not.

the new code that break all broken apps or keeping metacity
temporarely broken to have the other apps supported. as a sidenote
that the new code even break the usability of your own gnome specific
panel as soon as it's icon size are increased.

i don't want to have some lame workarounds like 'autohide the panel'
or whatever. you should seriously reconsider and rethink the current
situation, things are a tad more complicated today than you might
think. as written above people want to use their system today and
don't plan to be victims of strange experiements. if things seriously
start to suck completely then we all need to rethink the current
situation of gnome and probably tell people to switch to KDE which is
better developed and simply WORKS.

by the way there is no need to reply on this. i already realized that
you don't care much so let's end this senseless conversation. but for
the future don't even WRITE one line that contains stuff like:

'we listen to the users...'
'the normal user we asked...'
'on users feedback...'

and whatever that refers to users that reported things since it's not
true. you do anyways what you want and ignore things or simply reject
everything. we here in germany call such people 'einzelkämpfer' (lone
fighters) during the past i followed a couple of conversations even
with other people which usually ends the same way. 1 + 2 people decide
for the needs of thousands.

Please put your flames elsewhere than in the bug tracker where we are
trying to get work done. The mailing list is an appropriate forum.

it's now the 2nd time within this conversation that you call me a
'flamer'. i would be thankfull if you can stop this. i am getting gray
hair already and don't like beeing embraced this way.

are you always using this terminology for your excuses ? i mean it's
easy to mark every other opinion that doesn't fit your OWN VISION of
gnome as 'flame'. you now got 2 valid arguments from 2 different
people and you still don't care. maybe it's worth to forward this
bugreport to your employer so he/she can have a serious conversation
with your and how you act in the public.

BTW, the question about the autohide panel is a serious question, not 
a sarcastic comment. The autohide panel is an attempt to address the
same issue as the "autolower" panel.

Hi,

Ali:  

I agree with you that I'd like to have the panel below under windows, 
but try to calm down.  I know that these discussion get really heated 
and I get really frustrated sometimes too, but for whatever reason 
some of these people really do think they are doing what's best.  If 
we really want to make a difference we need to show them why we are 
upset about this.

Havoc: 

I'm not terribly familiar with the autohide functionality, but I 
imagine that it works the same way as it does in windows?  I suppose 
it would probably work, but it's not really a perfect match for what 
I'm looking for.  It would solve the screen realistate issue, but it 
means that I'll have to make sure I hit the edge with the mouse, wait 
for the panel to appear, and then click on the icon I want, rather 
than simply being able to click on the icon directly.  This seems 
like a rather silly thing to do given that I've never needed to do 
this extra work in the past.  After doing that, it really wouldn't be 
much more work for me to simply go up to the menu panel, click on 
apps -> whatever -> application.

So basically, a panel that hovers over other windows feels obtrusive 
and rather confining to me, but on the other hand, hiding the panel 
off-screen means I have to do extra work to access the programs I 
want to launch.  What I really want is a location on the desktop that 
has launcher icons laid out in semi-perminant positions, which are 
sorted independently of nautilus, and nautilus can't overwrite with 
the desktop icons.  This is the functionality that the panel in 1.4 
provided me, but the panel is 2.0 currently doesn't.  

Mark

@Mark

well the problem is that they claim to listen to users needs but
usually don't care much. but in the public they hype and argue how
much they do listen to these needs. this is all a simply lie. look now
i waited over 24hrs for mr. hp to reply to you. he didn't - which is a
simple sign that he ignores your conversation. this tends to this
conclusion:

'he is right, whatever he does is right, the users are wrong, users in
general have no brain, he listens to users needs but give a damn shit,
always report bugs to other peoples broken apps where his stuff even
breaks more' ... (list can be continued)

i can also go on and list some quotes from outside conversations where
people made some suggestions about other stuff that mr. hp usually cut
within the sentence before that person was able to point out what he
wanted to say/write.

same for seth, instead searching the problems on the own boat one
should report bugs to the other apps. it's so easy removing these 10
lines from stack.c and have everyone calm down and be friendly again
but no i should go on and report 250 bugs to the other apps i use. and
OF COURSE it's the other apps that suck and fail.

mr. hp the writer of 'cool ui designs and howto do it right' even
profterm doesn't care much to be a real gnome app it doesn't even
allow to have deatachable menues/toolbar, it doesn't even give a shit
if i want icons in the menues or not (selected from the prefs). so
much for 'doing it right for the long term'.

i am so fuckin' sick about this.... yes i know i sound offensive now.




@Havoc

ok bud autohide the panel, now let's say i want to use FULLSCREEN mode
in mplayer, xine, galeon, unreal-tournament, quake3 etc... i bet you
are willing to tell me how i autohide the top MENU that also stays on
top of all other apps and windows now.

maybe i should remove the top menu would be your reply, now if i
should autohide the bottom panel which is not my normal usage and if i
should remove the top menu and if i should not use 128 pixel panels
because it conflicts with the way of how the 'correct' metacity
operates then why don't you simply remove all that code from panel if
it's not the normal way a user should use his desktop...

... and by the way why are you telling me how i should use my own
computer and gnome desktop at home ?

Mark - I do see the point that autohide panel has an extra 'wait for
panel to appear' step. If we have an option to have an autohide panel,
perhaps we should have an option to have an autoraise/lower panel, or
perhaps an autoraise/lower panel is more useful than an autohide
panel. Working out the right thing here is part of the goal of
switching to always on top and trying that out. Presumably the purpose
of the autohide feature is specifically for the
retain-screen-real-estate case so the feature in that "slot" should be
the best feature for that application.

Ali - I do not have time to respond to every bug within 24 hours,
since there are literally 600+ bugs belonging to me in all the
modules/bugtrackers I deal with, and I do have other things to do.
I would also point out that Metacity is unstable, unreleased, and not
even part of GNOME at the moment, and that you could use the window
manager which is a released part of GNOME instead, or use KDE, or use
any of the many other choices out there.

Regarding your one substantive point, fullscreen windows are handled
specially and appear above the panel, so it's not an issue.
This is true in CVS but not the 2.4.0 tarball, due to a bug, but was
always the intended behavior which you'd know if you read the comments
on the other bug about this topic.

Sorry to be posting opinions here, this should happen on the mailing
list I guess, but I dont see many voices supporting Seth and Havoc
here.. so please try to think about the following for a moment.

Can you all please settle down for a week or two and see how this
thing works? If your particular usage pattern is hit by this, please
take a moment to see if there are some other, better ways to do the
thing (like the autohide thing, it seriously works for this case - if
the delay is too long, then we could maybe shorten the delay?)

The only thing that hurts me currently is the fullscreen applications
like xine, mplayer and other video players (plus Metacity's own
"fullscreen" mode.. :) that are below panels currently.

But please, PLEASE try to be open minded and try something different.
This is just to *try* how this works as far as I understand. Don use
CVS gnome if you dont like this kind of stuff :) 

The thing that is cool, and also sucks badly in Unix is that you can
setup things whatever way you want. And *very often* we get stuck to
our weird ways after a while, and get annoyed by anything different. 

If we want to make something consistent and default behaviour that
makes sense, it is *NOT likely* we will choose just *your* dream setup
- or *mine*. You probably will need to change your habits a bit. I am
happy to do that to get a sensible desktop that I dont have to spend a
hour to reconfigure on every machine I work on..

This is why I enjoy using the Mac, I get work done even though it has
only one mouse button. But clicking it does the same thing on every
Mac I have used, and the thing it does makes sense too. It does not
annoy me that I cannot reconfigure the desktop since it makes sense.
Why would I want to?

Please try to be open minded.

I realize this has already been closed, but I would like to throw in
my $0.02 on the issue. I see it not so much as a large bug, but more
of a minor usability issue. And yes, I do agree that it is somewhat of
a corner case scenario. The solution I would prefer, however, would be
to allow the ability to force a window to stay on top instead of
having an "auto-raise/auto-lower" panel. In my case, I was trying to
have a single terminal window on one desktop in fullscreen mode. In
this case, I wouldn't want to the panel to always be hidden; only in
that one spot. As for making the panel auto-hide, I have applets on
the panel which I prefer to have readily visible by only shifting my
eyes and not having to move the mouse around. So in thise case I
believe it would be better to force the terminal on top of the panel.
Again, just my $0.02.

hi, is it possible to get this _BUG_ solved really soon ? it's getting
totally annoying now. i don't know whats wrong with you since there
are now 5-6 similar bugreports talking about the same annoying
behaviour. this stuff is also making rounds in the #gnome channel now
where your own people is starting to hate this feature. i mean you
don't get many friends by staying this hard headed.

by the way i read the other bugreport where you tried to invent a new
_WM_FLOATING whatever hint so applications like gkrellm and xmms (and
all the 250 other apps) can use it. but have you ever thought about
that many of these people simply give a shit to gnome, gnome's window
hints and metacity ?

please explain to me what WE need to do more to make you get clear
minded again. i mean we reported bugs, you mark them as not a bug, you
told us to report bugs to other people's applications where these
people simply don't care much to gnome. what should we do now WHAT do
you want us to do to get your mind changed ? should we go out now and
kiss your ass to get your mind changed or what ?

realize it that metacity (the only working windowmanager for gnome 2)
is fucked up. i mean you may be a good programmer (as i previously
said) but you have no clue about the users of your apps. if you want
it the MAC way then why don't you simply move and work for macintosh
instead ?

Marking bug off-limits.

*** Bug 90423 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

OK, that's the wrong way to deal with dissension. If you think Ali's
being a prick, that's fine- I'll happily yank his entire account for
that. But closing the entire bug is not the way we should be doing
things. Reopening the perms; leaving the bug closed and perfectly
happy to yank the entire account if there are any more completely
non-constructive or otherwise negative comments added.

OK, I don't care how it's dealt with, I just don't want a bunch of
useless motivation-sucking comments cluttering my bugs and inbox after
repeated requests to stop. It has to be dealt with somehow.

Hi there,

I know this bug is kind of hot but i would just like to add my own
experience...

I built GNOME2 2.0.1 rc1 from tarballs and it uses metacity... no
problem with that. Full screen is not working... i tried to put the
panel as autohide like havoc suggested.. Same stuff the fullscreen is
letting the panel on top... (tested with mplayer)

Hope this helps...