luckily for me that even though i use gimp fairly often i don't use it for much other than small edits at the end of a digital painting workflow.
gimp does have a lot of menus. i could understand how a smaller monitor without a higher resolution would not have enough space for everything in the global menu when the panel indicators are also using the same space.
i could also understand how on those monitors that it would get a bit crowded when trying to maximize your image editing space and since the tools box is usually kept on the left side it would be easy to end up with a box of a lot of small tool buttons right along the left edge of the screen which would cause the same problems as the buttons of web browsers being right there by the left edge of the screen. inkscape would have the same launcher interference problems if maximized because it's got tools along the left side.
the 17 inch monitors seem to be a bad fit but there should probably be something done about that as there are people and places using older monitors that don't have larger resolutions. i was still using a 19" CRT until this past august.
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Josh Strawbridge