I'm using a netbook these days and by default, GNOME Shell isn't great for screen real estate, so to get more vertical screen space I'm using GNOME Shell Window Buttons extension and Maximus (along with GNOME Shell Global Menu).

Window Buttons is a GNOME Shell extension that tries to replicate the Window Applets (or Unity) behavior for GNOME Shell: it adds the minimize, maximize and close buttons on the top GNOME Shell panel.

The window buttons can be customized: you can select from 5 built-in themes (or create your own theme), place them on left or right or change the buttons order.

I used some Compiz settings and Namebar to hide the Windows titlebars and display the window title and buttons on the Gnome panel.

ElGandoz suggested (in a comment) an Window applet for Gnome called WindowApplets (actually there are 2 applets) which substitute maximized window title and buttons in a better way than NameBar. If you are worried about the buttons (see the screenshot in the beginning of the post) not fitting your theme: don't worry about it, you can change those.

The difference between Namebar and WindowApplets is that WindowApplets comes with two applets and you can position the window title and minimize, restore and close buttons separately on the Gnome panel. Also, you can set from within WindowApplets options to remove the maximized windows titlebar automatically, you can customize the font size, color and face and many other useful customizations.

Screen real estate is the amount of space available on a display for an application to provide output. Typically, the effective use of screen real estate is one of the most difficult design challenges because of the desire to have as much data and as many controls as possible visible on the screen to minimize the need for hidden commands and scrolling.

About a week ago, we wrote about gaining some space on your Linux Desktop (but the tutorial was focused on Ubuntu) by removing the titlebar of maximized applications - which can be achieved either with Maximus or Compiz. But at the time, we only provided some keyboard shortcuts to handle these windows. Read on to find out another way to do this and also how to use DockBarX for some even more optimization.

Before we get started, here is a small screencast I have just recorded with both NameBar and DockBarX in action: