Once upon a time circa 2011-12, Ubuntu could pluck out the applications’ menu bar (the ‘File’/‘Edit’/‘View’/… thing) and display it at the top of the screen, like it’s done in MacOS. Brief searching shows that this was just a setting in Ubuntu’s system preferences, which doesn’t quite inform as to how it was done. But iirc this was before Ubuntu has gone Gnome 3, and thus wasn’t specific to GTK 3 — though the ‘Activities’ in the screenshot below suggests otherwise; and afaiu Cinnamon uses GTK 3 anyway. If I’m not mistaken, this feature has also appeared first in the Netbook Edition of Ubuntu.
Is there some way to have this feature again in Linux Mint, Cinnamon edition, in the year 2025? I’ve googled around for a bit, nothing comes up except lots of ‘how to move the bottom panel to the top’.
Random pic from the web to show this magical technology:
For anyone wondering why I would do such a thing: Fitts’s law tells us that the time to accurately move the cursor to an onscreen target is directly proportional to the distance to the target, and inversely proportional to the target’s size, namely in the same direction as the motion. Well, menu items being at the top of the screen makes them effectively infinite in size in the top-down direction, since the user can just jam the mouse all the way in the proximity of the desired item without a care to the vertical position of the cursor (assuming they come at the target mostly from below). I don’t really like using the mouse, or using the menus either — but when I do, I’d like to have a better experience.
Curiously, this is one glaring example of where Apple designers did their fundamental research, while those at Microsoft dropped the ball yet again: in Windows 9x (at the least), the taskbar buttons had a one-pixel gap from the bottom where mouse clicks didn’t work — which meant that a user moving the cursor with all their Fitts-dictated efficiency had to readjust again before clicking a button.
I’m not aware of an already existing way to do that within Cinnamon, but you could try installing the Unity desktop instead (which is what Ubuntu was using back then). Canonical moved away from it in favor of GNOME some years ago, so it’s languished, but I was running a version of it until I jumped ship to Mint and Cinnamon earlier this year; it’s still possible to run it, though you might have to work around some breakage from limited maintenance.
Staying within Cinnamon, you can move the panel up to the top and re-arrange/remove elements on it. I made a few tweaks like that to my set up since I was running Unity for so long. e.g. put the menu on the right with a different icon, etc. That was good enough for me, personally.