Comment 5 for bug 275353

After talking with a friend the other day, I would disagree that this "not a paper cut." One of the first things that I've noticed that new users do is setup their panels - and the number one problem I see them encounter is positioning the objects in the first place and the number two problem is that everything gets screwed up when the screen is rotated or resized (so this is a HUGE problem with tablet users).

Also, I would say that this issue would be relatively trivial to fix by slightly adjusting the panel mechanics. Since GTK already uses containers for scaling areas you can remove the ability to absolutely position objects by switching to containers and instead expose the "fill" and "expand" attributes. This way the majority of objects will automatically butt up against each other (the default and expected behavior that most users must currently work around using the "lock" mechanism) but for advanced users there would be the ability to fine-tune which objects expand and fill. So, with a flexible spacer on the top panel and the Window List applet on the bottom panel (both set to expand and fill by default) you would get a sane default where new users can easily add and remove elements on the panels without taking tons of time locking and unlocking the panel objects just to get everything to line up properly.