This is a desktop environment, not a window-manager, so here it’s pretty expected. I’ve gotta say, though, virtually every window manager that does have a panel makes it toggleable. FVWM, Fluxbox, xmonad, i3, etc.
Sure, nevertheless having panels as a distinct class of entities seems a rude violation of the Occam's razor principle everyone apparently rushes to do as soon as they write their own. People love panels somehow. The more bells&whistless on them - usually the better. This is just a curious psychological phenomenon.
well, most users generally have a small set of operations they want readily accessible with a pointing device at all times, or status information they want to be available at a glance, without obscuring or interfering with window layout.
a persistent window, aka panel, is the conventional way to provide that.
it's simply a conceptual extension of the 'prompt' into a gui environment. nothing has surpassed the panel concept in the past forty years that it has been dominant.
i expect the 'panel' is the primary feature vehicle of any desktop environment - they are nearly synonymous. nearly every window manager also contains support for panels, even if they are not part of a desktop environment that specifically provides them. what do you use?
Okay, but why should not a panel be just an ordinary window without the "decorations" (close/minimize buttons etc) of a separate ordinary app? You know, the first time the idea of the panel disturbed me in a negative way was in Windows 98 where the panel (the taskbar) would often remain visible in some quirky way during (some rare times even after) the moment the display switches to a full-screen graphics mode when I launch the game.
The Windows taskbar literally was just another window but without any decorations. There was even a bug in Windows 95 where you could close the taskbar.
As for the full screen bug you experienced, I don’t recall ever seeing that but Windows 9x had a plethora of weird bugs so it wouldn’t surprise me if you had issues.
well, everything in a typical linux desktop environment runs inside a window manager, including the panel. some of them are integrated to an extent, but you're essentially describing the status quo.
and microsoft does all kinds of weird shit nobody has an explanation for.
Same was true in Microsoft Windows, but -- say it with me -- Modern Apps Don't Work That Way Anymore. You can't keep the redraws of all the widgets in sync, so you can't guarantee pixel-perfect window refresh. The Wayland way of only having top-level windows and client handling of all widgets within is, objectively, better for modern development.
If you could get it to still compile on a modern Linux system, you'd still be running an obsolete DE without security patches, and you'd be on your own as far as support is concerned.
