Perhaps I’m misunderstanding what you’re saying, but I don’t see the drawback you speak of. Plasma allows multiple panels, so you could easily, say, create a second panel containing only a task manager, place it at the top of the screen, and remove said task manager from your main panel at the bottom. Same with the systray, if it suits your fancy – or for that matter any widget on your main panel.

The embedded taskbars, now that one’s trickier. I’ve never used tint2 so I can’t comment on its feature set, but you’re certainly not limited to one monolithic panel anymore with KDE4.

In Xfce, I’ve set a bottom panel with launch icons, the menu button, and the system tray (clock, etc.). A top panel serves as a task switcher, and nothing else. While I could use a second Xfce panel for this, I much prefer tint2, which looks nice and can be customized; in particular, it can show separate embedded taskbars, one for each desktop. Then I can switch from one program to another, and one desktop to another, all with the same taskbar. Very efficient and easy. Both bars auto-hide.

Like you, I much prefer the task-switcher at the top of the screen. I use it more than the bottom panel, and it lies on my natural sight-line.

I believe that tint2 would work with KDE as well.

Maybe I should give it some love one day (or if someone is interrested by this taks… )

I’ve also tried having the panel on one side, like a NeXT dock, but most of the things I want in it aren’t the right shape or orientation for that.

(But I still love my DejaVu Sans. Thanks again!)

And hey, the panel can be moved for a reason – if you like to have it at the top, nobody is going to force you to change.
(½OT: I understand your excitement – felt something similar when I moved my tab bar in Firefox to a sidebar[1]. One of the best changes I’ve made to my web browser!)

To be honest, most of the problems I describe don’t really affect me since I’m a heavy keyboard user. Sure, I often use the mouse to move/resize windows, but it’s usually faster to use Alt + left/right click rather than dragging the window border.

To close windows with the mouse, you can use Smooth Tasks[2] and set middle click on the taskbar to close windows (similar to how you close tabs in many applications). Or what kriko proposes.

@kriko

What if someone already made it? [3]
Unfortunately it hasn’t been updated in a while – I don’t think it works in newer KDE SC versions, although I haven’t tried it.
I used to have a close button in the top-right corner on my netbook, but removed it because I didn’t use it. As said, I’m a heavy keyboard user, and especially on my netbook I try to avoid the touchpad.

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[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5890
[2] http://kde-look.org/content/show.php/Smooth+Tasks?content=101586
[3] http://kde-look.org/content/show.php/ActiveWindow+Control?content=91258

Also, on widescreens (especially netbooks) doesn’t it make more sense to waste space on the sides not the top? Or you can do what I’ve (and others here) started to do and not use a task bar at all. It takes a little while to get used to it, and as a crutch you can raise the number of virtual desktops.

Either way, after using left side and top task bars, I never want to go back!

With todays wide screens I think a taskbar at the left or right is even more interesting. But at least in KDE4.3 the placing of plasmoid-icons does not work well in a taskbar with a large width. (It has to be large so that entries in the task manager plasmoid can be read.) The Icons cannot be placed in a grid, e.g. three per row. Or am I missing something?

Maybe in the future kde could have some kind of layout setup wizard at first login, making suggestions based on some simple questions like “type of machine”, “size of screen”, “pointer input device”?

cheers,
Martin

P.D. Thanks for the tip!