I sure did! I came from Gnome 2 and the first thing I did once I started to use KDE5 was emulating the two horizontal panels design!
That counts, right?
Pretty much the same except there was a few years of Xfce in-between. But yep, pretty much still rocking the 2 panel setup. All the menus and tray icons at the top, just a large taskbar at the bottom for all the windows.
It’s a really good layout honestly, I’m not sure how we got from that by default to being forced to use that stupid activities overview thing other than trying way too hard to have the same bad UX as macOS. Why would I want to shuffle all my windows around just so I can click on the one I want when I can just… press its button in the taskbar to bring it up without inducing motion sickness. It’s seriously disturbing when you’re in front of 3x27 inch monitors. It’s like it’s designed exclusively to be like a MacBook or an iMac.
Lol sure does if you ask me. I hadn’t even realized until you brought it up, but Gnome 2 was my first ever DE way back when I tried Ubuntu for the first time nearly decades ago. Time sure flies!
I switched from GNOME 3 a long time ago, and emulating GNOME’s workflow would be the last thing I would want
Top bar, titlebar buttons on the left, “dock” on the right (which is just a panel), hotcorner, …
I don’t really try to replicate GNOME but rather take what improves my flow from Windows, GNOME, Unity, MacOS, …
But that’s the wonderful thing about KDE : you can choose to customize whatever you like however you feel !
Personally, not. The reason I switched to Plasma is that I didn’t like the basic layout – horizontal bar especially – and wanted a desktop environment that allowed me to customize positions and sizes of bars and so on as much as possible.
Still baffles me why they steal the usually scarce vertical screen real estate with a horizontal bar, instead of putting it on the side…
Sure did. Kinda?
Moved the panel to the top, added a dock (rip latte, it’s now just a panel) and set a hot corner for the overview effect. I like it to move windows between desktops.
Everything else is default though. Maybe I changed the application launcher widget, I don’t remember.
I’ve gone through Gnome 2, Unity, Cinnamon and nowadays tend to favor KDE and honestly, I pretty much always try to replicate a traditional experience no matter which of them I’m using, so pretty much the opposite of what you’re asking, I suppose. I’ll say I did appreciate the top left corner quickly exposing all windows, so that feature I try and replicate whenever possible.