GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 453743
Suggestions to Improve Panel Autohide
Last modified: 2009-06-18 12:25:51 UTC
The default timing for panel autohide is 500ms to unhide and 500ms to hide. After consulting with numerous Gnome users, it has been determined that these timings give the impression of unresponsiveness, and are a cause for much frustration. Most users, therefore, disable the Autohide functionality even though they desire it. Most users are unable to tweak the options themselves, as the timings are in gconf. The proposed solution is to decrease the default Unhide time to 0ms, and leave the Hide time to 500ms. With these new settings, the taskbar appears instantly when the user requests it, making the entire desktop experience snappier. Other information:
I agree with the decrease of unhide time, but i think it would also be nice to have a simple animation that moves the panel up and down when unhiding/hiding.
I agree completely that the default settings are awful. I didn't get around to finding a solution until about 2 months after originally switching to Linux, so I did leave the autohide feature off until that point. Now I have hide and unhide set to 100, which works nicely for me. A slow hide is acceptable to most users, but having to wait for it to come up just isn't.
I have also decreased apps/panel/toplevels/bottom_panel/unhide_delay to 200 ms.
Agreed. Hide/Unhide delays ought to be in the "properties" menu to allow easy configuration; if you want to get tricky, only have the options appear if the user checks "Autohide"; that way, anyone who isn't interested doesn't get confused by them.
Thanks for taking the time to report this bug. This particular bug has already been reported into our bug tracking system, but we are happy to tell you that the problem has already been fixed. It should be solved in the next software version. You may want to check for a software upgrade. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 585963 ***
Actually, the other bug is the duplicate ;-)