Top panel cannot be sized below 27 px when "Menu Bar" applet is present

[Jacob Moroni]

Hello,

The following (minor) issue affects 18.04, but not 16.04.

In 16.04, the panels are 24 px, but in 18.04 with the "Traditional" layout, they're 28 px.

So, in my attempts to make 18.04 appear the same as 16.04, I found that setting the top panel to anything less that 27 px has no effect.

If I remove the menu bar, I can set the panel to 24 px without issue. Also, the little MATE/Ubuntu logo next to "Applications" seems to be much smaller in 18.04, which might be related to the issue.

- Jake

[Victor Kareh (vkareh)]

I think that the mate-panel is behaving correctly here, as it should not get smaller than its widgets allow. Sounds like the global menu itself is not capable of being smaller than 27 pixels. I don't have the global menu, but with mate-menu, mate-dock-applet, and indicators, my panel cannot get smaller than 28px. I'm personally fine with this, but maybe we should take a look at the global menu to see if it's possible to change it so that it's smaller. Maybe smaller fonts could help?

[Jacob Moroni (jakemoroni)]

> as it should not get smaller than its widgets allow

That makes sense and does seem like desirable behavior.

However, in that case, I'd say the issue lies within the Menu Bar (Applications|Places|System) applet, mainly because it used to be able to go down to 24 px on 16.04. Whether that should be considered a bug or not is questionable though.

If I remove that applet, I can set the size all the way down to 17 px, after which the "-" icon becomes grayed out, which confirms that it's that particular applet which is preventing the panel from getting smaller.

I guess I just don't see why the "apparent" size of the menu bar applet has increased from 24 px in 16.04 to 27 px in 18.04 while remaining otherwise identical. There's already quite a bit of free/empty space around the icon and text, so it's not like a portion of it would have been clipped by going down to 24 px.

There's also no issue going below 27 px with the Brisk menu applet, so I think they should at least behave similarly.

That said, are 3 rows of pixels the end of the world? Certainly not. It's just mildly annoying that the panel can't be sized down when there's no visible top/bottom "interference" with any of the applets.

[Martin Wimpress  (flexiondotorg)]

Since Ubuntu MATE 21.10 it has been possible to reduce the panel to 17px, even with the Menu Bar in the panel.