I agree. See https://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Design/Guidelines/SystemStatus/#Update_Proposal

FWIW, even on a 22" widescreen touchscreen I have here the Shell's "panel" is a little bit too thin, you can activate its items but you have to have small fingers and be quite precise/flush against the physical screen border.

One interesting thing I noticed when testing this is that the shell appears to detect the fact that my finger is there, because the relevant item seems to highlight as if I was hovering it with the mouse. It appears that my touch is good enough for the shell to consider as "hover" but not good enough to register as a "click", so we might have a technical problem here and not only a design one.

It's possible that you're running into the same issue Jon was with his touch device.

Just ran into this as well, the problem seems to be that XI 2 clients that select for touch events don't get emulated pointer events. Which means gnome-shell needs to handle both mouse button clicks and touch taps seperately.

Do we need a separate bug for that?

(In reply to comment #6)
> Do we need a separate bug for that?

Probably, and against mutter.

Even if all the clicks we taken into account, we should still have a better way than clicking on a small target to activate the menus. Swiping from the edge of the screen would be one way (that's also useful for other parts of the shell chrome).

(In reply to comment #7)
> (In reply to comment #6)
> > Do we need a separate bug for that?
> 
> Probably, and against mutter.
> 

Bug #698843 filed.

We now have gestures, so I guess this can be closed.