Let's see your panels and indicators - I'll start out with screenshots

[galacticstone]

Hi Folks,

For those of you who utilize panel bars, I am curious how you have them set up. I am comfortable with mine now and thought I might share some screenshots and compare to how other users have implemented their bars. Firstly, I use the Metacities Flashback version of Gnome as my desktop GUI. I am not a fan of bulky launchers and task bars.

I have one panel bar along the bottom that is a small 21 pixels high. From left to right, there are : Main Menu button, Terminal launcher, Ubuntu Software center, Synaptic launcher, shortcut to my business folder, shortcut to Bobs Burgers folder (entertainment), Chrome browser launcher, shortcut to a business document, calculator launcher. There is a separator and a blank area in the center which is a window switcher with room for three active window trees. Then another separator with the Gnome multi-indicator display (Weather, System Monitor, WiFi, Bluetooth, Audio controls, time/calendar, power off/logout button. This bottom bar does not hide. (see bottom of first screenshot)

The screen shot also shows (bottom right) what pops up when you left click on the "System Monitor" indicator - a window that shows various system performance metrics such as RAM, CPU usage, swap, etc.

The second screen shot shows the top panel bar, which is smallest at 16 pixels and set to autohide. From left to right are : Wi-Fi stumbler, Force Kill, Task Manager, Tweak, Screenshot, Run Program, Gedit, USB/device launcher, Search. On the far right is the battery monitor. (see second attachment).

I don't use desktop icons. Everything I need is within the panel or the main menu button trees. :)

[yetimon_64]

My usual/most used desktop is xfce4 with 1 xfce4-panel at the top of the screen at 30 pixels high. I have screenlets set up to show CPU usage and disk space usage (not on the panels like yours) and an analogue clock; a conky shows RAM usage and various other aspects of the system.

Specifically my panel's contents are:

xfce whisker menu

Trash applet

Window buttons section

6 single launcher buttons for quick access eg. show desktop, pulse audio volume control, alsa mixer in terminal, kill seahorse, gst123 "next track" and a clear desktop images script.

22 drop down sub-panels with 212 various launchers: I do a LOT of custom scripting controlling various aspects of the system which I launch from the panel. 9 of these drop-down sub-panels control multimedia aspects including mplayer, vlc, gst123, sox, xmms2, quodlibet, the CD player, ffmpeg capture scripts and the laptop camera.

Notification area (collapsible: usually only showing easystroke, network manager and screenlets manager with 7 hidden other icons that can be toggled into view)

A digital clock

Verve command line

Log out/restart/shutdown sub-panel running custom scripts for such functions.

Between my panel set up with all the launchers running my scripting and the use of easystroke and the xfce4 right click menu I can control the vast majority of the system from the desktop.

I have included 2 screen shots, the first shows the panel, conky and screenlets; the second shows one of the custom scripting sub-panels expanded; it controls a set of 4 scripts I wrote a couple of years ago and can launch/restart/shutdown them as well as edit them or open the related mount directory and open the terminal profile the scripts run in all from the panel.

The xfce4-panel allows drag and dropping of files onto launchers or scripts even in the sub-panels which is very handy indeed. :)
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[Frogs Hair]

Deepin panel in efficient mode and control center. Budgie panel and applets in use , there are many more!