Does anyone else feel that Gnome does not utilize screen real estate properly?

[bp1509]

d

[golimpio]

You can change the toolbar icons size:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1007562&highlight=gnome+toolbar+icons+size

[mcduck]

Use a different GTK theme. The theme defines spacing around (and inside) program widgets, like buttons, toolbars etc.

There are several themes available that are made to be as compact as possible.

Also change your toolbar style from "Icons & Text" to "Icons only". If you want, also follow the instruction linked in golimpio's post to make the toolbars even more compact.

In general, I prefer some space around everything. Enough whitespace is important for usability. Although I must admit that some themes take this too far..

Also I've noticed that the actual amount of screen space wasted isn't nearly as bad as it seems. In most cases you actually get the about same amount of stuff on your screen, but Gnome manages to make it look like there's lots of empty space. I'd call that good design..

[bonfire89]

yeah, the 2 panel thing has annoyed me since day one mostly cause I'm usually using a 12" monitor and like looking at photos... A lot of time on facebook, which now has it's own panels.. along with the firefox bars.

When I was in windows, that why I like chrome a lot.

ie.

When I got to facebook now I have, starting from the top: gnome panel, firefox title bar, the drop down menu bar, the navagation bar, my tabs, (some out have bookmarks), tiny space for web content, facebook bar, then gnome panel.


arg.

I'm waiting for kde to smooth out some of their quirks. I like their direction a lot more. But I found gnome just works.

[3rdalbum]

I agree with the above poster. Gnome makes good use of whitespace.

I often found myself using a compact GTK theme like human-ultracompact, and I even used a "titlebar-less" Metacity theme! Actually, for a while I used the panel design from Ubuntu Netbook Remix - one panel at the top with an iconbox instead of a task bar; that saves some space.

People often complain about Gnome's two panels, but it's actually just a claustraphobic feeling. Each Gnome panel is only slightly more than half the size of KDE 4's panel, so there's no extra wasted space, it's just that people are used to having their windows go right to the top of the screen. It's like a feeling of being "closed-in" and it gives very mild claustraphobia.

[spupy]

I thought we are going to talk about the ridiculous padding of the widgets. I even tried to fix that in the theme's rendering engine itself, but it didn't help...

You can put stuff on the top panel to justify its existence, but a friend on whose laptop I put ubuntu removed that panel in the first 10 minutes.

[mrboojive]

Gnome Color Chooser is my favorite solution for dealing with the outrageously large widgets in Gnome. In addition to choosing colors, you can use it to make button icons smaller, toolbar icons smaller, adjust the width of scrollbars, etc. Installable through the package gnome-color-chooser.