Comment 3 for bug 1546654

The main reason the defaults are as they are, is that we haven't come up with anything better that works equally well for all screen sizes. Docking is great if there are fingers hovering over that general area of the screen, but less so if there's a pointer that has to travel the distance to the bottom. Stretching from edge to edge is a lot more desirable on smallish touch screens than on pointer operated 24" and larger monitors.

Judging by the bug reports we receive, tablet users seem to have become the majority, though. Perhaps it's time to inconvenience them less, turn on docking and stretching and accept the "broken" look on large screens.

At least short term. Medium term I think we could do better by adapting the settings to the system at runtime. I've been thinking about this on and off before, there would be a number of profiles to chose from, e.g. "Tablet", "Desktop", "Keyboard scanning", etc. . The most suitable one (hopefully) would be selected on first start, but it could be manually changed any time afterwards. That's too late for Xenial, though, I suppose. Too large of a change to get it accepted, probably.