Option to hide the top bar

Desktop
1

Currently there’s no way to hide the top bar, which would be nice for people that:

  • Have an OLED display and want to minimise the risks of burn-in. OLED displays are not a novelty anymore, they’re becoming more affordable and we’re starting to see them even in budget-friendly laptops
  • Want as much display as possible to manage applications

While other desktop environments (or the Windows UI) offer an “auto-hide” option for their bar / taskbar, I don’t particularly like these implementations as they may be not responsive and glitch out from time to time… Plus, there’s always the possibility of accidentally triggering the bar to pop up even when it wasn’t needed by just moving the mouse.

IMO GNOME could implement this functionality in the best way possible: have it visible only in the Activities Overview view by pressing the Super key or by moving the mouse to the Hot Corner (if not disabled by the user).

2

I agree this extremely useful and arguably necessary for some people. I have found this same problem as I use an OLED display for my laptop. Now given the Gnome philosophy of wanting minimal clutter in their settings, I think this would be a great contender for a feature in the Gnome Tweaks app since I do still think the top-bar on by default is best for most people.

1 Like
3

Just to be clear, I do also think that for the vast majority of people having the top bar is the preferred choice. Most desktop graphical interfaces have some sort of bar always visible by default, so I don’t think forcing this change on everyone makes sense.

Having an option though would be neat, it covers 2 use cases that I would say are becoming more popular. Plus I think that, for the way GNOME is designed, the implementation of this feature would be by far the best one.