I will never get used to Gnomes lack of native support for minimizing windows. I actually had to lookup how they expected users to manage windows, as it was not obvious to me. Apparently you’re supposed to move windows to another virtual desktop to get them out of the way. As someone who has never really clicked with virtual desktop, this doesn’t work for me. This feels like such a glaring omission of a convention that has been around for decades (even in past versions of Gnome).
I was on a call with someone from Red Hat a few months ago when they were sharing their screen, and he threw the windows over to another desktop to get them out of the way, following the design. While he seemed to do it relatively quickly, it looked pretty awkward for something a person would be doing pretty often. It was routine to perform vs a single click to minimize in every other OS.
I know minimization can be added with Tweaks, but it always felt a little hacky and buggy.
You don't move windows that you do not need right now to other workspace. You move to a new workspace with the window you are working on. Which is more logical, and workspace are cheap, and quick to navigate to.
There are even extensions, that opens new windows to a new workspace automatically.
But of course, I have few complaints about how multi-monitor workspace are handled in Gnome, I prefer how i3 handles workspace.
My workflow is never so organized and segmented that windows all group neatly together in workspaces together. This is why workspaces/virtual desktops never worked for me.
I can assure you, It's not about organization, not for me at least.
I just can't stand too many windows open in a single workspace, I get anxious, and close window, and then I close an important window and get lost.
With workspace, I don't have to close any window, go to another workspace, and keep working. If I remember something, on some other window/app, I can just move it to the current workspace.
So, now come to the point with too many window, traversing them become a huge pain. So, for that, I use `rofi` with window list option, so, I can just fuzzy search and jump to any window.
Switching by search is absolutely must if you are working in workspace and have too many windows.
I try to keep my projects in separate workspaces, and terminals related to the project in secondary monitors, and IDE on the primary, that's all organization I have
IDK about anyone else's experience but workspaces are not cheap on seemingly any system. Gnome on Linux, MacOS, Windows, all seem to have unacceptable performance degradation the more workspaces you open. I assume that this is because some frame buffer is being kept alive in all cases, but for the love of God, why?
I'm paying attention, and I have respect for the experiment, but something is wrong somewhere. Conceptually I love workspaces, having tried innumerable forms of spatial window management, and I have tried them across multiple OS's and I always run into this problem eventually where the system lags switching between them (despite apparently low resource usage across the board). For some ungodly reason despite the effort and money involved, OSX is the worst at it. Somewhere greater than 5 workspaces, each managing a fairly small amount of work, it lags like crazy on a powerful machine (M2, 64GB RAM). Gnome will just hang until the workspace has "finished" switching. Windows will switch quickly but will flash every app white until it reloads whatever context it needs to show me the right pixels. I know that workspaces exist somewhere in no man's land between "normal people" (what's a workspace?) and "power users" (who have thirty context-specific keyboard shortcuts for their desktop layout) but it's insane how badly they (anecdotally) perform across platforms. Not that your experiment isn't valuable, I certainly appreciate literally any amount of effort going into this problem, but I do wonder if I'm doing something specific to trigger the problems I'm seeing.
Workspace being froze or causing issue, is just the symptom of the actual problem. It's not the workspace are the problem. So, maybe you should investigate the underlying issue.
Which version of Gnome are you using? Older version of Gnome had an issue with workspace switch, which has been fixed over a year ago.
You do realize, Surface Pro 3 is a 10 year old laptop, which only have 4GB of RAM, and iGPU, and I have opened up 14 workspace, with multiple applications. And, obviously it had some lag, but it never became unusable.
maybe you’re doing something different from everyone else or your expectations are too high, but three finger swiping to move between spaces on macOS should feel smooth and buttery. There's a 200 millisecond lag after you switch spaces and when your input gets rendered (it starts accepting input in the new space as soon as you switch) that, if you're staring at that and focusing on that, watching it like a hawk, exists, but if you can get over that, Spaces/virtual desktops is a useful feature. The whole screen needing to rerender shouldn't be happening. What apps (or more likely, your IT department) are you running?
Have you tried Cinnamon? I've been happily using it for years, Cinnamon is pretty much GNOME before GNOME started getting bastardized. GNOME these days is pretty much two devs having very strong opinions about how the DE should serve them with no regards to usability or other users; I wouldn't hope that it will improve in the future.
(Which personally is what I want. I hate it when multiple windows are grouped together just because they happen to be instances of the same application. For me that has nothing to do with whether or not they are related to the same task!)
I never minimize windows. They are almost always full screen or split screen (unless I'm quickly grabbing a file in a Nautilus/Finder/Explorer window), and I just hide windows if I really need to. The same is true for macOS.
Forget what I do in Windows, been a couple years since I daily drove it.
I wonder if that's because I've used macOS and Gnome more than Windows for the last decade -- because its confusing as hell to cmd/alt-tab back to an app or click it in the dock and for its window to not appear because you minimized it rather than hiding it. When that happens, it usually takes 30 seconds until I realize the app is hiding in the task bar or dock.
I've used GNOME for years, and I'm not a heavy workspace user. I don't remember the last time I wanted a minimize action. If you really do want it, you can use GNOME Tweaks or Refine, which is the modern equivalent. Someone is working on an XDG Desktop Portal setting as well for the window actions.
I use macOS at work, and I've used Windows in the past. I still never use a minimize option. Maybe I'm weird, but I've never understood the use for it.
> As someone who has never really clicked with virtual desktop, this doesn’t work for me. This feels like such a glaring omission of a convention that has been around for decades (even in past versions of Gnome).
As someone who uses Gnome simply because IMHO the alternatives like KDE are worse, I came to the conclusion that these people do not work on desktop computers. It feels like an interface designed for tablets and laptops you operate by some swipe gestures.
I'm a KDE User, by no means a power user. I would love to know what makes KDE Worse over GNOME, I come from Windows Land so its workflows tended to work best for me. but I can see from a MacOS User how GNOME might fit their habits better.
It’s the Klutter. Apps with unnecessary taskbars, buttons and menus all over the place. Inconsistent ui. Not exactly great on screen real estate. I think they are making progress but the difference between kde /qt and gnome/gtk is still jarring.
For me, I tend to run Linux on lower powered systems and KDE was always very slow. Maybe it’s gotten better, I gave up on it and haven’t tried it in probably 10 years, but it just felt much more resource intensive than every other option.
I currently have to use macOS for work and despite it supporting minimizing windows (which Gnome does not) I almost never use it. Part of the reason is how minimized windows are unintuitive on macOS but part of the reason is also that if I don't currently need a window I will likely just put the one I need on top of it, or move to the desktop where the one I need it.
After years with i3 on Linux, then macOS, then Gnome for a few months, and back to i3 again, that will be a decade since I've minimized any windows. I'm either closing a window if I don't need it anymore or move it somewhere else.
I know habits and workflows can be difficult to adjust. But an alternate paradigm can be as useful as the one you're used to.
IMHO the Gnome team should bake in Dash to Dock and Desktop Icons NG into the core package. To me they are essential to get a proper functioning desktop in Gnome and it blows my mind that they are just 3rd party extensions when really it should be 1st party support.
Was never a fan of Desktop icons, nor dash or dock. I use none. And I feel they just adds clutter. Only reason I have the top panel visible, because I need to see the time. Heh.
I don’t understand desktop icons. Why spend the time finding the thing, moving your hand to the mouse and clicking when you can just hit super, type the first 2 or 3 characters, done.
What advantages do they bring in so that they need to be baked in? Like a good comparison between what you do with them and how problematic do you think the idiomatic interaction is.
If open windows are bugging you, you can simply move to a new workspace, as you mention. There's a keyboard shortcut, so that's actually very easy to do.
Gnome is very different from more common desktop environments, but if you accept to try and work with it the way it's designed, it can be productive and enjoyable.
Like the person to whom you're replying, I don't *want* another workspace, virtual desktop, or anything of the sort. Ever. So a system built around a model of "simply move to a new workspace" doesn't work for me. Period.
You have to think of it like "This desk is busy with some work, let's go to a free desk". So I can have a workspace with my Email and IM clients, one with my music player, another for my leisure browsing, and two each with an editor and a browser for the programming projects I have open.
I'm currently on i3 right now and I have 10 static workspaces (6 occupied):
1. Emacs frames (5 of them)
2. Browser
3. Terminal
4. Terminal (temp), but more often have calibre there, and other random gui tools.
You can tidy it up, but mentally it's that there’s a room for activity X and a different room for activity Y. It’s about this mess over here is unrelated to this mess over here.
I was on a call with someone from Red Hat a few months ago when they were sharing their screen, and he threw the windows over to another desktop to get them out of the way, following the design. While he seemed to do it relatively quickly, it looked pretty awkward for something a person would be doing pretty often. It was routine to perform vs a single click to minimize in every other OS.
I know minimization can be added with Tweaks, but it always felt a little hacky and buggy.