Positioning of login screen 'panel' inconsistent with desktop's

[Jani Uusitalo]

Binary package hint: gdm

This has been bugging me for a long time now.

There's a usability issue with the login screen's panel being at the bottom of the screen. It should be at the top, or at the very least the elements that are present in both the login screen and the desktop (the clock and shutdown menu) should be positioned consistently. It's very confusing as it stands, with the clock and the shutdown function jumping from the bottom of the login screen to the top of the desktop screen when we log in.

Either the top of the screen is the accessibility-wise better place for these elements, in which case they should be there *during the login screen also*, or it isn't, in which case they shouldn't be there when we get to the desktop *either*. They shouldn't be in one place on one screen, in another place on another screen.

I'm attaching a fancy little split-screen diagram of what I'm getting at, in addition to the stuff gathered by Apport. Sorry the picture uses my native language, I should have switched the VM's language prior to taking the screenshots. The shots are from an up-to-date Lucid, Apport's data is from my host which is running Karmic.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: amd64
CheckboxSubmission: 09ae689090491ca53449589269e4bfd8
CheckboxSystem: edda5d4f616ca792bf437989cb597002
Date: Fri Feb 19 17:13:34 2010
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" - Release amd64 (20091027)
Package: gdm 2.28.1-0ubuntu2.1
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=fi_FI.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-19.56-generic
SourcePackage: gdm
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-19-generic x86_64

[Severin H (severinh)]

Are there any reasons not to move the panel to the top in GDM? The consistency with the desktop could be increased even more by making the panel (as well as the login pane) dark, since this is the default setting for the desktop (Ambiance). This is of less importance than the position, though.

I for one absolutely agree with Jani's reasoning.

[lokster (lokiisyourmaster)]

How about making this option customizable? I think it makes sense and it's easy to implement.

[Jani Uusitalo (uusijani)]

According to upstream this has been fixed in Gnome 3.0.