Could there be ready made layouts in batclient? First one would be the one that is there now with all those windows. Then there would be other called 'basic', which is below in picture. That is a version with all the annoying features(to me at least) removed. Thats how I'd like to use batclient. Besides those two there could be third one called 'custom' which would be any layout saved by user.

BASIC:

The pre-made layouts are not a bad idea (especially if they're switchable on the fly).

When the 'default' layout was originally designed, we were struggling with what to display in the original setup. Especially if you take into account that not everyone runs on the same resolution-- so we adapted to 1024x768 as the default window, not too optimal for having several windows open at once.

Well, one solution would have been to make defautl layout check the users resolution and toss some weird layout passed on it e.g. with %'s instead of all fixed widths. Some windows do need to be fixed as they rescale badly e.g. news, combat, general, maps.

Btw, the default also looks terrible in systems with not so top end rendering features e.g. virgin ubuntune .

Yes, that would be a solution to some extent. However I'm afraid we'll concentrate on other features next.

Btw, you're using a broken windowmanager (Gnome has some serious issues with Java, libs and transparency)-- KDE is one which would work on your setup. There's nothing we can do to fix Gnome to our best knowledge.