PR proposal: Improved panel configuration flow

[Lurux]

While customizing panels isn't something most users will do often, the current state of panel configuration on Cinnamon has a few sticking points which could make the experience frustrating, especially for heavy configuration and multi-monitor setups.

Sticking points:

• Adding an applet to a desired location on the panel is intuitive and requires too many steps: add > (right click and) enable panel edit mode > move > (right click and) disable panel edit mode
• Adding a freshly installed applet to the panel requires going back to the manage tab
• There is no single place to have an overview of what applets exactly are present on any given panel (apart from looking what's on it, hidden applets notwithstanding), and the applet management options are completely separate from the panel settings
• The edit mode allowing one to position applets on a panel is not present on the applets management page

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Overall, while admittedly minor papercuts on their own, these combined make for a fairly clunky and unintuitive experience, especially for new users, which might not know about the flow and location of all these options in the first place.

If the team is interested, I am willing to explore possible avenues of improvement, design mockups and assess their technical feasibility, and, if the team is on board with the resulting designs, try my hand at implementing a revamped flow.

This is all very hypothetical for now, but I'd like to know if I should start this mockup and technical assessment phase in the first place if the team is interested in that.

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Potential avenues of improvement (raw ideas):

• Break up the "applet management" tab into a tab for applets present on a given panel and one for the whole list of installed applets
• Combine the panel settings and applet list of a given panel as two tabs of a single page
• Allow dragging applets directly from the applet management tab or downloaded applets tab directly to a given location on the panel
• Complement or replace the edit mode with the ability to re-order applets directly from a tab/page listing the applets present on a given panel, and/or tie the "edit mode" to be enabled whenever the "applet management" window is focused (combines nicely to point 3 just above)
• Very optional: explore the possibility of allowing users to save panel layouts, thus adding the ability to easily switch between default layouts out of the box and for users to upload their own layout to the spices store

Obviously this is all very raw ideas for now but I'd like to know if the team would be interested for me to go on about creating more comprehensive mockups, assessing their technical feasibility, and trying my hand at implementing them if the new flow was to be validated.

Multi-monitor improvements could also be assessed as part of this explorative work. It shall be noted I am willing to help with that alone if the team is interested, see also https://github.com/orgs/linuxmint/discussions/1429

[Lurux]

As a side note, I know it might look like I'm popping out of nowhere with all of this, but I've been thinking about this for a while, have a background in HCI, and have made a few (admittedly minor) contributions to Cinnamon in the past, I've just been very inactive these last few years because of my studies