Panel Issues

["Jonathan A. Zdziarski" <jonathan nuclearelephant com>]

I upgraded to 2.4 recently and it appears that the panel manager has
suffered severely.  Please correct me if I'm wrong but it appears from
the notes (and using it) that:

- Menu panels with beveled edges are no longer supported

- Floating panels are no longer supported

I've also noticed my entire home directory appears to be the desktop of
gnome, but I would think that is configurable (just haven't found it).

The two panel features, if they were really removed, removes a
significant aesthetic advantage Gnome had (IMO) over users converting
over from Windows.  The reason I personally haven't wanted to use Gnome
in the past is because it was so stinking ugly.  When I found that I
could customize it to look a bit like OSX:
http://www.nuclearelephant.com/images/screenshot.png I decided to go for
it, and have since wiped Windows off my system.

Unfortunately 2.4 is just too ugly for me to use in the professional
environment I'm in (where i frequently have to use my desktop as part of
a presentation), so I've dropped back down to 2.2.  I would love to find
a way (if possible) to use 2.4 with 2.2's panel manager, but I feel that
removing one aesthetic feature in exchange for another was a bad move
for Gnome.  It is the features like these that set Gnome apart from the
rest of other  desktops and provide more good reasons for Windows users
to switch over.  If Linux is going to stand a change  at replacing
Windows as a desktop operating system in the future, we need all the
features (including aesthetic features) we've got to muster =)

I'll continue to keep an eye on gnome development; hopefully someone
will put these back at some point so I can upgrade.

Jonathan