LXPanel suffers from many size issues. Most notably, buttons in the tasklist are larger than the panel itself. furthermore, Even for flat buttons to work, one must have the panel height be two higher than the icon height. Either way you look at it, it’s a mess and it drives me crazy. Thus one of my first acts in getting involved in LXDE is to attempt to address the problem.
You can check out my progress on the patch here in LXDE’s patch tracker. Currently, it properly trims the icons to fit in the buttons without expanding it past the panel. Unfortunately, it also must size icons on flat buttons too, because whether or not the button is flat, the widget still seems to reserve that space. I am not sure there is a solution for flat buttons that does not break what I consider the main point of this patch, make it so the icon size can equal the panel size.
I personally think that having the icon size equal the panel size is the expected behavior of a panel. It certainly seems to be the choice that GNOME, Xfce, and KDE have made, but what do you think? Should the panel icon size be able to match the panel height? Should the icons somehow be made bigger for the flat button look?
