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Comment by kagamine | Hacker News Reader

Magnificent link, thanks. On the Apple subreddits there are occasional discussions about moving from WIn to OS X in which this issue of the static menu bar on OS X comes up. I have always preferred the OS X way, but could never explain why.

Additionally, does anyone know of *nix (preferably Linux) DE that does it the OS X way?

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> Magnificent link

If you're interested in this kind of stuff, may I recommend reading Designed for Use by Lukas Mathis.

> does anyone know of *nix (preferably Linux) DE that does it the OS X way?

Gnome 3 does it slightly differently (menu entries get collapsed into one) and tries hard to respect Fitts's law, to the point of being quite innovative in how submenus work (they expand instead of branching in a tree). If you approach it with an open mind, it's quite nice.

KDE used to have an option to put the menubar on top. Plasma changed a lot of things, so I don't know if this still stands.

Ubuntu/Unity?

Unity has never done it for me, and on my hardware it has not performed as well as I would like.

edit: a google search of unity doesn't show it with a menu bar for file, edit etc anchored top the top of the screen like OS X, those menus are still in the application window.

I'm an Enlightenment user when not at work, so maybe I need to create a E19 fork (I wouldn't know where to start).

When did you last time try Unity - it has improved a lot since first versions? I bought MBP few months ago and I find myself a lot less productive with OSX than with Ubuntu+Unity.

About your edit. Are you sure? They are not in application window for me.

I have not tried Ubuntu for a couple of years. I'm very happily using Bodhi Linux on my daily computers at home. No plans to change.

Not sure it has improved as far as the UI look goes. That ugly oversized left bar is hideous, as are all the badly low res gifs they seem to be using for icons. Look at osx or windows which have been doing crisp looking icons for a while. I could not bear to use ubuntu, have tried, went back to osx + windows 7.

You actually can customize the size of the dock, and have it set up to hide/show based on mouse position or keyboard shortcuts. There's a lot of options if you install "unity-tweak-tool"

There are also some nice alternative icon sets, like the Numix icons. Overall, I really like Unity now compared to when I first tried it a few years ago, and I'd rather use it than Windows 7 or 8. But it probably does need a couple of tweaks to fit your needs.

It's an option on Ubuntu/Unity, there was a lot of hatred for it being docked to the top of the screen so they brought back application level docking I believe in the last LTS, but I could be wrong.

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