alt Hacker NewsI like the top panel in gnome. You need a place for your clock and you status icons. I don't really care much if it's at the top or bottom or sides.
As an aside: From a 'clickability' perspective the app menus in the top bar are nice of course and I theoretically agree that's the best place for an app menu. But in practice I really dislike macos' 'separated' app menus when a window is not maximized.
Replies
The panel itself is not the problem, it's the lack of integration with windows. In GNOME, when you maximize a window, the title bar stacks underneath the top bar. If that window also happens to have a menubar (e.g. LibreOffice) that gets stack underneath as well.
This is just a lot of wasted space and makes the menubar harder to click, compared to having the menubar at the very top, next to the screen boundary.
On MacOS it was a great example of the use of Fitts law, a vertically infinite target for your mouse pointer for commonly used tasks when you didn't memorize the keyboard command. But on a giant monitor it's too far away from your work. Macs, for the longest time, had 512x342, 640x480 or 512x384. It was already getting far away at 1152x882.