Now that I have new shiny monitor, and running in 1600x900, I'm finding myself with an awfull lot of screen real estate. Now, I'm a person who likes a desktop that is clean & functional and doesn't distract me from doing productive work. That's why I prefer Gnome above KDE, as it offers a more sober desktop environment. It's not that I don't like desktop bling-bling, but bells & whistles should not distract me. That's why I'm using the trailfocus feature from Compiz, so that inactive windows get transparant, and the focussed window gets my full attention.
That's why I also like maximized windows. But on 1600x900, a maximized window is 30% too wide. Text in Thunderbird & Firefox gets smeared over a too wide distance, which makes it more difficult to read. So I was thinking of using the right part of the screen for displaying system information & other stuff. Many aeons ago, while my preferred window manager was WindowMaker, it offered an applet system which could be docked on a side of your screen, like you see in this picture. Gnome offers the same thing with its applets, but recently more bling has been added in the form of screenlets. The problem with this is that maximized windows cover the dock area, so that you need mouse or keyboard actions to make these visible, and that's not the idea.
With the latest versions of the Sidebar screenlet, however, this dock area can be fixed, so that maximizing a window still shows the Sidebar area. My experience however with screenlets is that most of them are still very attention demanding, especially due to the bright colors they use. It takes some time to find screenlets or screenlet themes which offer a sober screenlet experience, so we'll see.
The Sidebar has some other possibilities : I use 2 Gnome Panels, one keeping a window list, and another stacked on top of the first, containing many application launchers. As the Sidebar doesn't get covered by maximized windows, maybe I can now replace the launcher panel with a Mac OSX like panel.
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