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.
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.
Can you use GNOME and KDE with Mint?
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.
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.
Have you tried changing what the applets do when you click? Most of the time you can set whether it should create a new instance, cycle windows or raise or lower existing ones from the applet settings. See if changing that could help?
I use XFCE/Budgie (flick between the two) so not too familiar with cinnamon.
When you installed Linux, what desktop environment did you choose? There are several. There’s Gnome, KDE and I think there’s also Cinnamon.
If you tell us we might be able to help you better.
Search for how to do it in your specific DE (cinnamon, XFCE, etc.). In most of them you need to create a second panel, and there’s a specific setting to limit what tasks are shown based on monitor and workspace. Definitely not great defaults, but it’s fixable except in some circumstances (XFCE doesn’t let you have multiple systrays for example).
People are still using Google as a search engine?
It’s still pretty good for some things. Any recommendations besides ddg (I find it horrible for tech research)?
SearXNG
Thanks, looks cool. Any instance recommendations? searx.be seems to be the most up to date and isn’t located in the USA.
searx.be, as you said. But you’ll have to switch instances occasionally due to rate limits.
But you’ll have to switch instances occasionally due to rate limits.
Let’s hope that doesn’t become too annoying.
Too bad the “It” category is broken so I can’t search for “how to kill children” and get the correct results. If ddg had that feature I wouldn’t have stopped using it.
I got my KDE setup like that, sadly you gotta do it manually in the edit mode and it can be a bit finicky at first.
The grouped window list applet seems to get confused when there are multiple instances of the applet. It will display windows that you create on that monitor on a separate workspace (new desktop) but not the ones you create on the other monitor.
The window list applet seems to work more like you would expect when the option is turned on, so maybe that’s a workaround. It doesn’t group windows though.
IMO this is a bug and not the expected behavior.
Edit: it seems like it is coded to act this way, but I still think it is bad behavior with the “all workspaces” option enabled. There is a workaround, but YMMV: https://electro-dan.co.uk/blog/34/linux-mint-cinnamon-multi-monitor-show-all-apps-on-every-panel
Edit 2: @jjsca@infosec.pub in the Applets menu, Downloads tab, CobiWindowList works more like you would expect. It doesn’t show from every Workspace (virtual desktop) but will show from each monitor. The setting for both used to exist in the grouped window list but was apparently broken (from github issues).
It depends on the DE you use. I only know about 3 of them :
KDE can put as many panel as you want with all the system tray you want. You’ll have to pine the applications on each panel individually.
On Gnome, you’ll have to install extensions as dash to panel to have a panel that can be cloned.
On Cinnamon, you’ll be able to create a panel on the second screen, pine applications on it, but not all of system tray can be duplicate. There is a ticket opened for that : https://github.com/linuxmint/cinnamon/issues/9889
