Preventing dual use of top bar in desktop and windows

[ufarmer]

I might be searching for the answer to this question using the wrong keywords as none of the solutions I have found have the desired effect.

I believe the top bar in the <insert curse word> Unity desktop is called the panel and that the top of every window is called the title bar.

1) I want to stop the title bar of maximized windows from merging with the panel so that one has to mouse over the now-shared area to see menu options.

2) Even in non-maximized windows, the title bar seems to serve a dual purpose and one has to mouse over it to reveal some menu options. I want to change that behaviour too.

At best, I seem to have stopped the title bar of maximized windows from over-writing the window controls on the top left but I still have to mouse over the top of every window to reveal the menu options. The settings I have been directed to by various "solutions" -- like System Settings and the gconf editor -- all seem to be already set to disable this behaviour.

[bonzo2]

ufarmer,

Greetings. It's been several months since you posted. Did you ever get this issue resolved? I am also trying to make this change and cannot figure out how to have both the title and menu always (rather than alternatively) displayed.

Bonzo

[egeezer]

I never found an answer to that question myself, so I simply installed the Xfce desktop on top of the Ubuntu to run as a separate session. After a while I liked it so much I installed xfce4-goodies as well and now run it like Xubuntu, but with many more features accessible. Ubuntu+Xfce is now my distro of choice (heavy, but any relatively recent desktop/laptop can easily handle the load).

[bonzo2]

Hey egeezer!

Thanks for responding. So, I borrowed your approach and loaded xfce4 via Synaptic. Now I'd like to remove it for awhile. I removed xfce4 via Synaptic yet there are still about 28 installed items that include xfce in Synaptic. Are these remnants from my experimental installation of xfce4? Would I need any of those in the absence of xfce4? should I uninstall them?

Bonzo :-)

[egeezer]

It wouldn't be surprising if you had some bits and pieces left over from your original install of xfce4, since you used Synaptic rather than a

sudo apt-get remove --purge xfce4
process. In fact, you might run that command if you want to clear it all out.

If you intend to go back to it (you said you'd like to remove it for a while), it would be best to reinstall using

sudo apt-get install xfce4 xfce4-goodies
sudo apt-get update
which will give you all the Xfce configuration options that let you shape it to your liking.
.