13.10 Gnome Classic - How to autohide the panels?

[W00ster]

After installing and selecting Gnome Classic, I get the top and bottom panels but with no way of changing the behavior to autohide as I do not want the panels visible during normal work.

Using dconf to show the panel settings, shows they are configured to autohide:
$ dconf dump /org/gnome/gnome-panel/layout/toplevels/top-panel/
[/]
x=0
animation-speed='fast'
y=0
orientation='top'
unhide-delay=100
y-centered=false
auto-hide=true
enable-buttons=false
expand=true
y-bottom=-1
hide-delay=0
size=24
enable-arrows=true
screen=0
auto-hide-size=1
monitor=0
x-right=-1
x-centered=false
$ dconf dump /org/gnome/gnome-panel/layout/toplevels/bottom-panel/
[/]
x=0
animation-speed='fast'
y=1056
orientation='bottom'
unhide-delay=100
y-centered=false
auto-hide=true
enable-buttons=false
expand=true
y-bottom=0
hide-delay=0
size=24
enable-arrows=true
screen=0
auto-hide-size=1
monitor=0
x-right=-1
x-centered=false

It is also not possible to bring up any panel menu, I've tried all sort of key combinatio to no avail. Alt+Right Click , Super+Alt+Right Click, etc.

Where is the menu? the dconf-editor also shows no entries for the panels anywhere. Why can I not change this?

[Frogs Hair]

The Gnome Flashback session allows hiding the top panel , but classic is a variation of the Gnome Shell and uses a shell theme, so a shell extension may be the only way to achieve auto-hide in that session.

[W00ster]

Thanks for the info.

When I start a Flashback session, I get the panels but they contain nothing so the session is not usable. I have to switch to a console, log in an kill the session and log back in using one of the other DE's.

[Frogs Hair]

You can try adding panel items in Flashback with Super +Alt + Right Click , but I have no clue why everything is missing . I actually logged into that session for the first time after seeing your post.

[Frogs Hair]

Never Mind , There is an extension, but the panel is not accessible once activated and I had to turn it off from the gnome extensions page.

https://extensions.gnome.org/#

[MZ250Supa5]

I'm having problems with this too. Ever since Ubuntu decided what a wonderful idea it wsa to impose the truly disgusting Unity on us, at least there was the option of using Gnome Classic. Even though it wasn't a patch on Gnome 2 it at least did approximate it's useability and intuitivemess. But we no longer even have that option with vanilla Ubuntu, and have to test out Ubuntu Gnome, which is horrible - looks horrible, (regresses to looking like a very early instance of Ubuntu) and the panels cannot be made to autohide, something that is a deal breaker for me.

Why, oh, why is it that people like devs and geeks seem to think that we want rubbish like these desktops imposing on us? There was absolutely nothing wrong with Gnome 2, it worked and with the addition of the Compiz eye-candy was an amazing sight to behold. It's no wonder that Ubuntu is going down in the popularity stakes, becoming as it is more and more difficult to personalise or even do the basics like finding applications easily.

I guess that's it fo me, I loved Ubuntu up to 10.10 before the idiots took over the asylum and ruined what was once a great distro. Bye bye Ubuntu, I'm off ot find a PROPER Linux distro.

[grahammechanical]

Actually, it was the Gnome developers that started this all off by stopping development of Gnome 2 and Gnome Panel in favour of Gnome 3 and Gnome 3 Shell. They never intended anybody to be using the old user interface by now.

Unity was intended to be a kind of Gnome shell extension but the Gnome developers refused to allow the Unity APIs to be brought into Gnome shell. That is why the Ubuntu developers went on alone.