I had emulated Windows’ look and feel shortly after I began using Ubuntu, but I have now became convinced of the Gnome way being the right way. I realized my brain was already confused with the location of the menus due to just the short dip into the Gnome default. That is to say, I found myself looking for the desktop menus from the top of the screen although I had only just touched that solution briefly in the beginning – what more proof is needed for the naturalness of the Gnome way? So, in an attempt to follow the Gnome philosophy to the strictest, I tried to re-organize my desktop back to the way it was right at the beginning.
It took me some time to find out how to add the second panel back, as most of the Ubuntuforums threads seemingly related were not, so here’s how to do it: point to the other panel you have, right-click on it and select New Panel. I do wonder if the Gnome people think this is the most accessible way of doing this; at least in my mind, the panels are added onto the desktop
so I would have expected the choice to add one to be available by right-clicking on the desktop. But apparently, the birth of a panel is more like the birth of an amoeba (where one becomes two) rather than the birth of life itself (where naught becomes one).
I tried to avoid the somewhat nasty way of removing all Gnome configuration files because I did have some settings I wanted to preserve. Unfortunately, at some point I ran into Bug #153382 (or a similar one), where Nautilus makes the desktop disappear, starts hogging up the CPU and spews error messages into a logfile in the home directory. It was only due to finding the logfile that I found out what was going on in the first place, and I have to say this is one of those bugs that, although quite easy to solve with some experience (the nautilus process needs to be killed), is probably a horrible experience for a beginner running into it.
In the end I did have to resort to logging out of Gnome and removing the configuration files before logging back in. Luckily, the issue of virtual terminals not being visible seems to have been temporary or at least not present when I needed a console, so I didn’t have to go casting rm -rf‘s blindly.