Complete panel transparency achieved yet?

[LinWinux]

Hi there. I've been using Mint XFCE version for the past few years, but always together with Mate since I think that Caja is the best file manager in the world. Can't live without it because of the instant MP3 preview hover mode. Anyway, I've been wanting to have a clean install of either Mint / Mate with nothing else ... or Mint / XFCE with nothing else. With XFCE I don't get the instant MP3 preview. With Mate I could never make my panels 100% transparent ... to include the panel ends. In Gnome2 there was a workaround to get the panels 100% transparent but that workaround doesn't wok with Mate.

So here the question ... can someone tell me if Mate 1.8 panels and above can be make completely transparent? With XFCE panels it's a no brainer and takes only a few seconds. That's what I would like to be able to do with Mate panels. Let me know please. Thank you.

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[LinWinux]

Wow, disappointing. Am I the only person on this forum who'd like to see fully transparent Mate panels? I was trying to avoid completely installing all of Mate and running it in a separate session. I would have thought that someone here with Mate experience might know wether or not full transparency is achievable by now?

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[nomko]

Maybe you checked this already, but did you had a look at the panel settings? Right click on panel and then select properties.

[LinWinux]

Yes, of course. I've been using *buntus since 9.04 and originally there was a way to tweak Gnome2 panels and make them 100% transparent without the ends of the panels being visible at all. But this never worked in Mate and the Mate developers who took over Gnome2 for the purposes of creating Mate never (in the past) felt that that was important. Now that Mate 1.8 has been released, I was hoping that it would be possible to (finally) make Mate panels completely transparent too. I know it sounds a bit harsh, but I think it's stupid to have to "bloat" a system with an extra complete desktop setup, just for the sake of having the panels.
It's not about the space that's taken up, but about all of the extra system settings that aren't needed.
Also, having Mate installed alongside another DE produces double icons all over the place ... very annoying.
(main menu, settings, session manager)

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[eanfrid]

So here the question ... can someone tell me if Mate 1.8 panels and above can be make completely transparent? .

"Yes you can" ©

[LinWinux]

Thanks. I'll install Mate in a few minutes and then I'll check it out.

EDIT: Well, okay ... transparency is only as good as the functionality where it's being used. I'm not going to mark this as solved because the problem is still there. Granted, just the actual panel itself can be made 100% transparent. However, that doesn't do anyone any good if he or she is using the window buttons, notification area, and other items since those still do have their thick & nasty ends on them. That kind'a defeats the whole purpose of making the panel itself transparent (IMO).
XFCE solved that problem with end to end transparency on panel items, with transparent spacers where needed.
It's an improvement though ...

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[baldrick.777]

Screenshot#9.jpg

Screenshot#10.jpg

Hi,

I use the bottom panel set to fully transparent as above...

I've set it to autohide as well, because it doesn't so much make the panel transparent as it copies the bottom of whatever image is on the screen at the time, as seen in the 2nd shot.

It would be much better if transparent was truly transparent, but I'm pretty happy all the same...

[LinWinux]

Yes, well, that's exactly what I've been griping about with Mate for years ... They took away the Gnome2 tweak that actually made it possible to have 100% transparent panels ... as it used to be possible to do that with a little bit of "adjusting" in the theme rc files. That's why I've been using Mate in the past ... but with XFCE panels. If you look at my cityscape screenshots you'll see what I mean. XFCE panels can have any level of transparency that you desire. The bottom panel in the cityscapes has total transparency until the end, but because of the background color I've added a couple of transparent spacers to make the space between the ends and the symbols look almost identical. It's just cleaner that way. I'm using my own home made symbols too.

If you look at my dragon screenshot, there are actually *TWO* more panels on the top that can't be seen because they're set to full transparency with auto hide. I used to love Mate and Gnome2 panels because of the drawer widget that could be added to the panel ... to have just one single symbol with several items contained therein. The symbol opens like a drawer and then you can use other items within that drawer. You could even change the symbol of the drawer itself and make it whatever you want. With me, it's all about having a clean desktop ... one of the main reasons why I can't stand Unity or Gnome Shell. They took the "freedom of linux" away from the user (IMO).

XFCE panels have the "drawer" function too, simply by adding additional items to the existing launcher that was first added to the panel. I'll say this though, the XFCE panels are a little more difficult to customize, but only because there's more that you can do with them. As of XFCE 4.8 you could even have multiple panels directly next to each other. Another thing that used to be a bug with Gnome2 and Mate panels, is that if you had a bunch of symbols locked on them and rebooted ... those symbols could come back totally jumbled up ... even though they were previously locked. Can't tell you how much that used to tick me off, back in the day when I still had dozens of symbols in my panels. To me personally, Mate won't be perfect until full panel transparency is achieved and until Mate stops dumping all of the extra symbols in Session, System, Settings, Main Menu, and other areas even though the user is running a completely different desktop. To me, that's just plain sloppy. So now I just use Mint XFCE with Caja, and that's it.

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[LinWinux]

Here's an example of what I mean by "drawer effect" in the screen shot below. If you add additional items to an existing XFCE panel launcher, you'll automatically get a tiny little arrow below that launcher. When you click on that arrow all of the other items within that launcher become visible. So you can either click on the default launcher which in my case would be Thunderbird, or you can click on the items within that launcher. One of the things that attracted me to Linux back in 2009, was the ability to have my desktop look exactly how I want whenever I choose ... something that I still couldn't do with Windows after 18 years, or even right now for that matter. And yes, you could change the XFCE symbol images for every item as well as their descriptions. But that's going a little overboard ...

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[scryan]

Yes, of course. I've been using *buntus since 9.04 and originally there was a way to tweak Gnome2 panels and make them 100% transparent without the ends of the panels being visible at all. But this never worked in Mate and the Mate developers who took over Gnome2 for the purposes of creating Mate never (in the past) felt that that was important. Now that Mate 1.8 has been released, I was hoping that it would be possible to (finally) make Mate panels completely transparent too. I know it sounds a bit harsh, but I think it's stupid to have to "bloat" a system with an extra complete desktop setup, just for the sake of having the panels.
It's not about the space that's taken up, but about all of the extra system settings that aren't needed.
Also, having Mate installed alongside another DE produces double icons all over the place ... very annoying.
(main menu, settings, session manager)

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Sorry, no help other then to remind you that if you have a USB you can test with out installing in live mode.... but yeah...

You can install and use a different file manager with your desktop... they both are probably even GTK stuff aren't they? I wouldn't think the dependencies brought in would be too out of hand... it doesn't take the whole desktop environment.
You should be able to set your default applications, one of which would be for your file manager?
If mint makes it too difficult, and you are willing there are other distros that focus on giving you the components you want with out extra bloat.... I.E. You install linux, then xorg, then whatever display manager and desktop you want, then you add the apps you want.
So like you would install mate-desktop and xfce4-goodies and you would have a mate desktop with xfce4 applications... They do tend to be more manual but it really cuts the bloat...

[LinWinux]

Not really sure why you wrote what you did? Take a look at what I wrote last Wednesday ... which pretty much sums everything up. Installing all of Mate has very little to do with the amount of required space and much more with all of the additional Mate duplicate entries that end up appearing all over the place. I did mention that I've been using *buntus since several years now, ever since version 9.04 was released. Matter of fact, since about 3+ years ago I switched completely to Linux ... having tried at least 8 different distros ... and installed Linux on dozens of computers ...

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[scryan]

Not really sure why you wrote what you did? Take a look at what I wrote last Wednesday ... which pretty much sums everything up. Installing all of Mate has very little to do with the amount of required space and much more with all of the additional Mate duplicate entries that end up appearing all over the place. I did mention that I've been using *buntus since several years now, ever since version 9.04 was released. Matter of fact, since about 3+ years ago I switched completely to Linux ... having tried at least 8 different distros ... and installed Linux on dozens of computers ...

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Ummm....I'm sorry?

I wrote that because I thought it might help... because after your several years of linux and 8 different distros you don't seem to realize that while caja is the default for mate, and Mint bundles it all together, linux is a collection of parts and you can totally replace ONLY the file manager, so you can have XFCE and only install caja, not mate, using the DE you want with ONLY the file manager you want, with out installing all of mate. This can be done in mint too, but the make it a little more difficult. Not sure why you give me your resume.... That has very little to do with the fact that you don't seem to understand that a file manager can be used with or without its entire desktop environment. Bringing in something like a KDE app will require a lot of libraries since it will all be in qt and what not, but most of the mate/xfce/cinnamon stuff share enough libraries that t shouldn't be too much stuff.

I mention other distros because most barebones distros such as gentoo or arch offer desktop environments without their default apps, then their default apps as a separate package. So you would install mate, but it would not come with ANY file manager or any of the normal programs until you installed them individually OR chose to install the package of all mate programs. This would make it VERY easy to install the mate desktop environment with none of its standard software suit, then install xfce4-goodies for all of the normal xfce programs.

Please be a little less aggressive with people who are taking their time to explain to you how you can accomplish what you want (barebones system with XFCE using caja file manager). No need to puff you chest out so much.

[LinWinux]

You do realize that this post was about PANELS right? In Mint 12 and 13 (not sure about 14) as well as Xubuntu 12.04 - 13.04 it was *NOT* possible to install Caja or the XFCE panels in Mint without installing a lot of other dependent packages or the Mate desktop. I know this for a fact because time and time again I've ended up with all sorts of duplicate entries & packages after trying to install strictly Caja by itself on the XFCE desktop ... or XFCE panels on the Mate desktop. Only recently has this been changed at the GUI level which is what I use since I'm not into manual commands via the terminal if I don't have to use them. Sorry, but I found it irritating as to why you would comment on things that were either already previously addressed in the same post ... or to start talking about things like Caja primarily, which wasn't the topic of this post to begin with.
Isn't that what's commonly referred to as hijacking a post? Just saying ....
No harm no foul. Whatever ...

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