I wanted to move my system monitor widgets into a vertical panel. However, doing so causes them to resize to a significantly greater height so I can't even fit them all within the height of my screen anymore, and there seems to be no way to resize them.

The same plasmoids can be resized when placed on the desktop, but when placed in a panel they will fix themselves to this arbitrary large size.

Any idea how to solve this problem?

Which Plasma version?

Mamarok wrote:Which Plasma version?

My apologies, should have mentioned.

Plasma 5, fully updated, on Arch Linux.

Does the vertical panel have other items or is this the only one? And you mention "widgets", do all behave that way or only some? I just tried to place my panel vertically and added the System Load Monitor, it sits normal sized where I placed it. It only changes size when I resize the panel, but that affects all widgets in the panel.

My setup is very vanilla, the only thing I change is choosing the Breeze Dark theme instead of the standard Breeze one

The vertical panel was made wide, because the idea is that the monitors should always be visible on the side of my secondary screen, taking up about 1/8 of the screen width. Having them in a panel instead of on the desktop would allow them to be used across activities and to have full screen windows snap next to them without covering them.

The issue here is that the user is unable to manually size widgets when they are in a panel, unlike when they are on the desktop, which is true for every widget.

well, yes the widgets are not manually resizable in a panel, they adapt to the size of the panel. How about making the panel narrow, put all the system widgets in and the change the width of the panel? That should just work, unless you want to use only one, then of course the panel is definitely the wrong approach

The problem is that when manually sized I can fit all of them on top of each other on the desktop but in the panel they get much taller, so they don't fit anymore. And the panel cannot even scroll, so whatever does not fit will be permanently off screen and inaccessible.

I was hoping there is a workaround to set manual heights, eg. by editing the file containing the settings or such, because it just makes no sense that otherwise freely resizable widgets become completely uncontrollable dead weight once placed in a panel.

the wigests should resize as soon as another one is added. I can't reproduce your problems here, so maybe you are using some setup that interferes.
Try adding a spacer between the widgets, that might help

You can't reproduce not having manual control? So you can resize them manually?

Here is an example of why manual resize is needed. On the left the manual size I set for the widget on the desktop. On the right the much taller size it changes to when added to a panel:


On the left, all my widgets fit on top of each other on the desktop. When I move them to the panel they change to arbitrary sizes:

No, I meant that it doesn't get excessively tall in my test, and adapt when resizing the panel, so this might be your panel being different. Maybe try using another panel type.

Widgets inside a panel are never resizeable manually, they adapt to the panel size.

Mamarok wrote:Widgets inside a panel are never resizeable manually, they adapt to the panel size.

That's exactly the issue.

They shouldn't lose their ability to be manually resized just because they are in a panel. It's inconsistent, counterintuitive, pain in the **** and there is really no reason or benefit to removing this ability.

I suggest you file a nicely worded wish for this on https://bugs.kde.org