I’m curious what package was used in PureOS that would allow the taskbar to pop up when sliding the mouse cursor to the left side of the screen. Given that I was forced to switch to Debian for compatibility reasons (LaTex, etc.) I’d really like to use this package here, but I can’t find it anywhere. Would anyone be so kind to point me in the right direction?
PureOS seems to be a specific flavor of Gnome. There is a hotspot in the top left corner that does this.
By default, GNOME brings up the “Overview” when moving the mouse to the top left corner, as @soundboard6 said. I think the default keyboard shortcut for this is Super + s.
However, maybe you are referring to the “Dash to Dock” GNOME extension? This gives you a dock (kinda like MacOS) from which you can launch your applications, and it can be configured to place the dock on the left side of the screen.
I might have communicated somewhat confusingly, but what I meant is usually referred to as a “tray” in windows. I’ve added some images below, I hope this clears up the confusion, given that I’m familiar with the docks both of you refer to.
Thanks for taking the time to reply!
Ah, yeah, sorry for the misunderstanding. I’m actually not 100% sure what PureOS is doing there. GNOME used to use that tray, but starting with GNOME 3.26, it has been removed.
Various GNOME shell extensions (like TopIcons Plus move those icons from that tray to the top bar (which I think is nicer, as even though that tray was just a small sliver when closed, that small sliver still got in the way and was annoying in my opinion).
Interestingly, my version of PureOS appears to be running GMOME Shell 3.22, yet icons still show up in the top bar. But I don’t explicitly see a shell extension installed that would do that. So Pursim must have done some tweaking to move the icons to the top bar (for me, it was the top right, near the Wifi/Ethernet symbol, but TopIcons Plus puts them at the center, near the time)
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Thank you very much! I’ve got it working, although not as smoothly as the previous pop-up window. Unfortunately, none the plug-ins I tried before asking worked.
I’ll try that too, thanks!
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did this help you? I am having the same issue … many apps go to this tray panel when the minimize instead of the panel down below as you perfectly showed in your screenshots, so I really need a fix / work around for this…
Most worked, but the most elegant (for me, YMMV) was using this Gnome Extension:
https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/615/appindicator-support/
Note: this one isn’t in the PureOS repo’s (yet), so you must download the browser plug-in to activate it. After this, everything will be neatly minimized to the top right corner.
Coming from Windows, I find the PureOS Activities menu awkward. The favorites bar works nicely for opening new tasks, but I’d like to incorporate active tasks somehow. Only the current active program is listed in the top bar, and I have to sweep all over the screen to select a different one. There is plenty of room in the top bar to list other open tasks; is there a reason for not doing so? The top bar is always visible, so it wouldn’t be intrusive. Alternately, a Windows type bottom or side pop-out task bar would work.
Top Icons Plus looks like it might be what I’m after, but comments indicate that it is no longer maintained. Is this an issue I should be concerned about as a Linux neophyte? I’m also leery of downloading things not already in the PureOS options, because I don’t know what I’m doing half the time, and flying by the seat of my pants the other half 
I believe that Topicons Plus and Taskbar will fix most of your problems. Topicons didn’t work completely bug free last time I used it, so that might be the downside of it not being maintained.
A quick glance over your states needs, makes me think you might appreciate KDE instead of Gnome as a desktop environment. Gnome made some rather odd design decisions (no tray being the most annoying for me), and KDE poses a very intuitive (coming from Windows) and configurable alternative. AFAIK the packages needed are on the PureOS server, so you’d just need to download it using these steps: https://wiki.debian.org/KDE, if you’re interested.
Thanks, I’ll give it a try as soon as I can block some time for experimenting!
I managed to optimize a layout that I think will work well for me, just utilizing the Tweaks menu. There are more options there than I thought, and I was able to tune up a few things that I didn’t expect to change so easily!
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