I, like many others, have been getting worn down by Microsoft's awful changes to Windows over the years, and I finally said enough is enough and moved to Linux.
I had a little linux experience beforehand due to my work, but this is my first time using it as my main OS. I am still very much a noob when it comes to linux.
So far it's been great though. I am running Linux mint.
I am having 2 issues I can't seem to solve, though. The taskbar (or I guess as Linux is calling it, the Panel) was only on one monitor rather than both. I managed to put a second one on my other monitor, and I enabled the "show windows from all workspaces" option on both panels. But it isn't behaving like I have come to expect using the Windows one.
For example, both panels have the icon for Firefox. If I have Firefox open on my main monitor, and click the firefox icon on my second monitor's panel, it just opens a new window instead of bringing the existing firefox window into focus.
An example of why this annoys me that sometimes I am playing a game that is full screen, and the flow i have over a decade of experience with is that i could click that firefox logo on the second monitor to bring up the window i already have open.
Is it possible to just have 2 identical panels that function the way the taskbar does on windows?
I am willing to switch from cinnamon to a different DE if thats what it takes. I tried installing xfce, but it seems like the issue is exactly the same there too. Not sure if switching to a different DE will help.
Or is the solution to just use a different applet than the default one in the panel?
Sorry if this is the wrong place to post this, this is the only linux forum I am aware of.
EDIT: Strangely, it seems like this issue is only occurring on the second monitor. If an application is open on the second monitor, but I click the icon on the first monitor's panel, the behavior I want happens, it just puts the existing window in focus. Not sure why that is, the applets on both panels are identical as far as I can tell.
You can, though it might not be a great experience. Using Gnome on Mint especially is kind of funny tasting given the distro's history.
Mint used to ship a KDE version but stopped to focus on other things, as there were plenty of distros that offered a good KDE experience. Kubuntu and KDE Neon are both fairly close to what Mint KDE would offer.
When Gnome decided to do whatever Gnome 3 was, a lot of people didn't want that. And I know of four DEs now that sprang up that were trying to fill the void that Gnome 3 sucked into the world with its creation:
Mate. The good old fashioned "we don't like the changes, so we're gonna fork it and keep making the old thing ourselves." Mate is Gnome 2 that kept on chooglin.
Cinnamon. At first, the folks who ran Mint tried to release a set of extensions for Gnome 3 to make it work more like Gnome 2, then decided to fork Gnome 3 to make their own DE and called it Cinnamon.
Unity. Canonical's DE they made during their "re-invent every single wheel" phase. They abandoned it in favor of Gnome with some extensions to make it look a little like Unity did, and my understanding is some teenager picked it back up.
Cosmic. If I understand right, and I might not, System76 has bent Gnome into such a pretzel for Pop!_OS that they're calling it their own thing called Cosmic.
Mint ships two of these four DEs. They make Cinnamon themselves and they work pretty closely/share members with the Mate community. They also offer an xfce version for a few reasons, another GTK-based DE that isn't GNOME.
So using Gnome on Mint, the "anything oh god anything but Gnome" distro is just kinda funny to me.
Excellent breakdown of history there