The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

I haven't had that problem for the past 3 or 4 years or so - I think something like your patch must have gotten merged eventually; when I right click on a panel object now I get a menu that includes a "Lock to panel" checkbox (which can be unchecked to move or remove it, or let it float as a "wild-west" placement object.) The object order (for locked objects only, I suppose) is written in gconf.

> Important applets getting lost, or the user deleting his panels? Don't freaking let the user remove them.

Nooooooooooo! I tend to prefer a setup with a floating panel (not taking up the whole width of the screen) in either the top or bottom right corner, and no others. I use launchers and applets/notification icons/message icons/whatever-the-heck-they're-called-this-week on the panel liberally. One of my favorites at work is Remmina, as it has a pulldown menu for common RDP targets (we have a lot of Windows virtuals.)

What's an "important" panel object that shouldn't ever be removed? If you're using Blackbox or Enlightenment or FVWM as your WM then the Applications menu is completely superfluous, as it is redundant to functionality in the window manager. So somebody using GNOME as their DE but a replacement WM instead of Gnome-Shell would be stuck with a panel with an "important applet" that's vestigal, like an appendix.

This problem is already taken care of by the "Lock to panel" checkbox anyway. You have to deliberately unlock something to remove it. A bigger problem is disappearing panels - if you put the panel on your third screen, turn off your computer and then remove the USB monitor, you just lost a panel. Unless you're using a WM that doesn't respect the GNOME DE hints, you can't find it even with meta+tab. And I have no idea where the gconf entry for THAT is - last time that happened to me I ended up deleting my entire .config, .gconf, .gconfd, .gnome2, and .gnome2_private folders so it would reset my settings to default...