XFCE's Standard Dock is Suboptimal for Touchscreens

Hi,

I appreciate all the work that must go into making a LinuxCNC distribution. Thank you.

I've been working on mocking up a user interface for LinuxCNC. Also I've been making a little video glossing over both the .hal and .ini. I notice that XFCE has both a dock and menu bar on top.

This is not the best arrangement as it provides needless distraction to the user.

Having both a dock as well as a menu bar on top wastes precious real-estate when using touch screen monitor, or even the kind of small monitor which often adorns a CNC machine or panel display.

In LinuxCNC's future releases, perhaps one of the following changes could be made:

1.) Perhaps XFCE menubar could be integrated to the dock, through settings, and made standard on LinuxCNC releases.
2.) Perhaps the windowing could be changed to LXDE/Openbox, as a user interface option, which oddly has an even lower footprint than XFCE. Raspberi Pi uses this combination.
2.) Perhaps a Cinnamon/Debian variant could be used if its footprint is small enough.

Thank you for your consideration,
BrendaEM

Right clicking on either panel, top or bottom, allows you to change it's properties or even remove it or change position.
Both panels can be removed and access to the applications menu can be accessed by right clicking on the desktop.

I have a suspicion that the way the desktop is setup to start with is a "debian default".

To remove the lower dock is a 2 second job, to move the taskbar come menu bar to the bottom is a 3 second job, no config files to mess with. There is even an "auto-hide" option for panels.

ozzyrob, Thank you for the reply.

Though, I hope that it will be improved in a future release of LinuxCNC.
Small screens seem to be a CNC machine norm, so conserving screen area will help the user.

From most of what I've seen over the past few years a lot of machines are being built using an old 15" or 17" monitor. Don't forget if you make a touch screen interface too cluttered there's some boof heads like myself with fingers that have seen the best part of 30+ years of manual labour.

Clear simple screens + TAB's to add needed functions as many of us use 15/17" monitors.

If you like Cinnamon, Mate or another desktop you can install them easily using Synaptic. (I usually switch to Mate.)

LXDE was a painless thing to install via apt-get.

The dock is easier to remove than to add if it's not there, some may even like it.

This is what I have been working on.
Do you think that this is big enough?

forum.linuxcnc.org/41-guis/34572-a-wides...e-interface?start=20

While the dock can be eliminated, which I did (Thank You), what I was interested in: To have LinuxCNC just-work and work easily for most users, which I strongly suspect would appreciate screen real estate.