I, like many others, have been getting worn down by Microsoft’s awful changes to Windows over the years, and I finally said enough is enough and moved to Linux.

I had a little linux experience beforehand due to my work, but this is my first time using it as my main OS. I am still very much a noob when it comes to linux.

So far it’s been great though. I am running Linux mint.

I am having 2 issues I can’t seem to solve, though. The taskbar (or I guess as Linux is calling it, the Panel) was only on one monitor rather than both. I managed to put a second one on my other monitor, and I enabled the “show windows from all workspaces” option on both panels. But it isn’t behaving like I have come to expect using the Windows one.

For example, both panels have the icon for Firefox. If I have Firefox open on my main monitor, and click the firefox icon on my second monitor’s panel, it just opens a new window instead of bringing the existing firefox window into focus.

An example of why this annoys me that sometimes I am playing a game that is full screen, and the flow i have over a decade of experience with is that i could click that firefox logo on the second monitor to bring up the window i already have open.

Is it possible to just have 2 identical panels that function the way the taskbar does on windows?

I am willing to switch from cinnamon to a different DE if thats what it takes. I tried installing xfce, but it seems like the issue is exactly the same there too. Not sure if switching to a different DE will help.

Or is the solution to just use a different applet than the default one in the panel?

Sorry if this is the wrong place to post this, this is the only linux forum I am aware of.

EDIT: Strangely, it seems like this issue is only occurring on the second monitor. If an application is open on the second monitor, but I click the icon on the first monitor’s panel, the behavior I want happens, it just puts the existing window in focus. Not sure why that is, the applets on both panels are identical as far as I can tell.

  • boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net
    15·
    8 months ago

    What DE is the question.

    I recommend GNOME with the dash to panel addon, or KDE. You can also use LXQt, but it doesnt yet have Wayland support. If it has, you can install it with Wayfire, Kwin or even cosmic comp.

      • Shareni@programming.dev
        12·
        8 months ago

        You can use any DE with any distro, but not every distro will have it customised well. Mint devs focus heavily on cinnamon as they’re the ones developing it, so everything else looks far worse.

      • boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net
        11·
        8 months ago

        Both yes, and Mint is better because no snaps and vanilla GNOME afaik.

        But still based on Ubuntu LTS, I would recommend Fedora 39, wait a few months until Fedora 40 is more tested. If you go like that you will not have bleeding edge updates and suffer from bugs.

          • emzili@programming.dev
            2·
            8 months ago

            Says who? There’s nothing wrong with having multiple DEs installed, and any decent desktop manager (like sddm) trivializes launching into any of them.

              • Shareni@programming.dev
                3·
                8 months ago

                citation very much needed

                The only thing it does is use up more storage if you for example have only GTK, but install a DE that uses QT.

                • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  3·
                  8 months ago

                  Desktop Environments alter plenty of config files, like the ones in .config and .local

                  They can interfere with one another. I’m not really sure how you could say they don’t. E.g. change some settings relating to gtk in one DE and it can change them in another.

                  Plus there’s the clutter aspect of it. Searching for settings and seeing four settings apps.

                  E: oops, the ~ character caused some formatting issues. Removed.

                  • Shareni@programming.dev
                    2·
                    8 months ago

                    They can alter some shared config files like the keyboard layouts and network settings. Since I’ve never had an issue with that, I’m guessing they’re not overwriting everything without a care. Or I might’ve just gotten lucky when trying out different DE’s

          • boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net
            1·
            8 months ago

            For sure, but you could.

            As others said, Mint is just desnapped Ubuntu LTS at that point. So I would rebase to Kubuntu. Oh, forgot that was not a thing on the traditional desktops.

            Really, try Fedora atomic KDE, it is awesome.

      • boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net
        1·
        8 months ago

        KDE poorly also doesnt have the “clone panel to all monitors”, you need to configure it seperately for every new one, which is pretty bad.

        But you could just create the “default panel” and call it a day.