Show Apps button at top by default

[jbicha]

Reasons for this change

1. Since the Activities button (or Applications button if you enabled that extension) is at the top left, it makes sense for the Apps button to be at the top left closest to it.
2. Since Unity is being discontinued (or at least no longer Ubuntu's flagship desktop), maybe it's a good idea to provide a default that's more similar to what Unity had.

Reasons against this change

1. The current default has been here a long time.
2. The current default is more similar to Windows.

Other Info

Similar reasoning for extend-height to be enabled by default?
These are 2 of the 4 changes suggested by the Debian maintainer @highvoltage in #385

[micheleg]

Thanks for your thoughts and thanks for the argumentations on the pros and cons.

I disagree on making the panel mode the default. The reasons are a purely personal preference (I even pondered many times about dropping the panel mode... but don't worry, I won't do it) but more importantly sticking with my original motivation to develop the extension: let's move the dash to the desktop to have a standard dock, without trying to completely changes the default gnome-shell experience. For the same reasons, I like to keep the default positioning on the left (although I lately personally switched to a bottom positioned dock). For the same argument I'd keep the button at the bottom, but I might rethink this.

I saw a significantly renewed interest for the extension since the spreading of the news about Ubuntu dropping Unity. And I also took unity as an inspiration. But my first target is not trying to reproduce the Unity behaviour, although I'm happy if other people can use the extension for this end, but rather tweaking the Gnome Shell workflow.

[jbicha]

One problem with having the dash autohide is that it means that it's not as useful for touch screens. (On the other hand, intellihide is a cool feature and I believe Unity once had a similar feature enabled by default for a while but I think it was disabled by default because of usability issues.)

Anyway, this extension is packaged in Debian/Ubuntu and we might change some of the defaults there.

[micheleg]

Yes, i really liked Unity intellihide (which was later dropped) when I was trying around Gnome 3.2 and Unity. Ended up implementing intellihide in Gnome Shell before updating my system to Gnome 3.

I think customizing the defaults at the package level would be the easiest choice. I don't know if I can do something to simplify it (I haven't sort out #385 for instance).

[jbicha]

@micheleg I can't duplicate #385 after https://gitlab.com/jbicha/gnome-shell-extension-dashtodock-packaging/commit/89ef6ac

(I think the schemas ought to be automatically installed to /usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas/ when doing a system install but I haven't looked into tweaking your Makefile to do that yet.)

[AsciiWolf]

@jbicha I think that, instead of changing the default position, it could be a good idea to add option to change the Show Apps button position to GNOME Control Center.

edit: This is how the dock looks like when moved to the bottom. As you can see, the Show Apps button is at the end of the dock and there is no user-friendly way to move it.

[janopae]

Moving the Apps button to the top has one downside regarding usability, as it will not bee in a screen corner any more. Putting things into screen corners (or edges) however is important regarding usability, as it makes things more reachable with a mouse (as you don't have to stop moving the mouse at the right place and therefore basically can't miss it). The activities button already uses this trick in the top-left edge, the bottom-left edge is unused in default Gnome. Therefore, it would be reasonable to put things into screen corners whenever possible.

If "Unity had it on the top" is the only argumentation for putting it there, it seems to be reasonable to provide it as an option for people who want to recreate Unity, but putting it there shouldn't be the default option, as it is disadvantageous from a usability perspective.