Panel menus are a UI mess
First of all the gap between the panel and the menu (1) is too big. No menu anywhere else opens this far from where you clicked. The gap uses the same size from the default floating panel offset, except - unlike the panel offset - it's hardcoded in c++ and can't be reduces via plasma theming or even qml. This is the "bug" part of this post, rest is just poor design.
Secondly, the menus have big faux "titlebars" (2) with big labels that take a lot of space and (depending on panel position) shift the relevant parts of the menu even further from where you opened it.
Finally (see below), the menus don't have size based on content. Here's a panel menu for disks. The actionable part of the menu is 1 line long, with the rest taken up by the titlebar and empty space. You can get rid of the "titlebars" and empty space by opening them as separate widgets, disabling in the tray, then resizing manually - but that's a lot of user-end configuration to still not get good result.
All this negatively impacts both the usability and aesthetics of what is arguably the most important part of the desktop shell (panel and its menus).
Posted Dec 6, 2025, 4:54 PM UTC