Comment 14 for bug 116807

A further thought occurred to me while attempting to explain this to someone at 1am over a cheese sandwich.

The EWMH doesn't actually say that the switcher decides the workspace layout. What it says is that _NET_DESKTOP_LAYOUT (which is what decides the number of rows) must only be set by the switcher and never by the window manager.

So if the switcher isn't on the panel, and hasn't been since we started, _NET_DESKTOP_LAYOUT won't be set on a screen at all. Now suppose we started up and found that this wasn't so... well, perhaps the panel hadn't started, so we'd set a timer and come back to the matter a second or so later, and if it still hadn't, we could fish the number of rows out of gconf and pretend we'd read it instead.

The trouble with this, though, is that the number of rows is stored as a property of the applet, so we'd need somewhere else to keep it for this one particular case.