Comment 117 for bug 668415

for portrait mode on a widescreen (eg, 1080x1920) locking the panel to the left-hand side is a problem. IDEs, office suites and most apps steal pixels for scroll bars, notifications, docks, etc - at least 100 pixels, maybe 200, leaving you with 900ish pixels. the 50 that the side-panel requires means you're giving up 5% of your width, maybe 5 characters

the difference between 85 and 90 characters of width is huge

obviously, this isn't just ubuntu's problem. it's modern aspect ratios, it's apps that waste space on the display, it's our insistence on making everything a rectangle even if it means 90% of the space is wasted, it's developers and authors making their documents wide (i'm a guilty party here), it's facebook using a fixed width display. but getting religious about the panel location is particularly egregious - it effects every app, every web page, every document

fwiw, i'm actually 1200x1920, which is about the best that you can do these days (and it's getting harder and harder to find) and i had to sacrifice viewing angle to get it. i have gnome panel on the bottom of the screen, and have configured most of my apps to not use horizontal space for anything but the document. and i still run out of horizontal pixels regularly, eg 120 char width code, facebook, many web sites, some pdfs. if i was 1080 with unity's panel, i don't think i could do it - i'd have to switch to landscape mode and i'd be getting 45 or 50 lines of code on the screen instead of 90