A great way on a laptop to get some more screen real estate for browser windows or your terminal is to move your taskbar to the left like the default MX Linux XFCE theme. You can then disable text for the start menu, change orientation to Desktop in preferences, and greatly clean up the running applications view with Docklike Taskbar for XFCE. The link below has tips on how to set it up and the github page page previously linked had how to download, compile and install the plugin for XFCE. So thanks go out to Nicolas Szabo and David Keogh for this wonderful project. Consequently, XFCE is one of my favorite desktop environments and extremely light and responsive, and this makes it look more modern and like KDE.
https://www.linuxuprising.com/2020/12/docklike-plugin-xfce-panel-icon-only.html
