Moving from Windows to Linux – How to make the taskbar/panel look more like Windows

The old adage “How do you know somebody is a Linux user? Because they’ll tell you” is about to hold up true.

In this article I’m going to configure the taskbar/panel found in Linux Mint to make it a little more familiar, I have a multi-monitor setup so wanted to make sure that I could have a similar panel on each screen and I wanted it to be somewhat similar to the taskbar found in Windows purely because I’m used to it.

By default on Linux Mint, you only have a panel on the main monitor. Although there are in theory ways to copy the panel between monitors they are unsupported as far as I can tell so I would suggest avoiding them.

Before/After

So we’ll be going from something similar to this, which will only display on a single monitor by default –

To something similar to this on all monitors, this will show programs only on the monitor they’re open, the full date and time, system icons on the primary monitor etc –

Create a Panel on each Display

So the first thing to do is to create a Panel on each display, this is quite straightforward if you follow the process below –

, right-click the panel (known as the taskbar on Windows, we’ll refer to it as Panel from now on).

Right-click the panel on a blank spot.
Select ‘Add a new panel’ in the contextual menu that appears.
Red highlights will appear on each screen, select where you would like the new panel, I selected the red bar at the bottom of each of my monitors to create new panels on each.
At this point we should have a blank panel on each of the other two monitors.

Recreating the Main Panel on each Display

Now we need to recreate the ‘Applets’ shown on the primary monitor, for me these include the following Applets (I’ve boldened the ones I personally copied to the other monitors) –

Menu – This is the Start-like menu that shows a menu of all installed software
Seperator – A small separator, right of the Menu icon
Grouped window list – A list of open software and shortcuts (set to only show programs on the current display)
XApp Status Applet – Equivelent to the System Icons tray from Windows
Notifications – A button to open system notifications
Network Manager – Shortcut to basic network settings
Sound – Shortcut to basic sound settings
Power Manager – Shortcut to brightness and power settings
Calendar – Full date, time and shortcut to calendar view.

We can add most of these to the new panels, some are limited to single use however, the process below covers how to add and configure where required, each applet.

Right-click one of the new panels.
Right-click the panel again then select Applets to open the available applets window.
Select each applet that you want to add then click the + symbol at the bottom of the window to add it to the panel.
Close the Applets window.
Right-click the panel and select ‘Panel edit mode’ to enter the edit mode.
Drag each applet to be either left, center or right-aligned as you like.
Right-click the panel then disable Panel edit mode.
You can now right-click each applet in the panel and select Configure to change a variety of settings.