While most of us are used to this system and its quirks, that doesn’t mean it’s without problems. This is especially apparent when you do user research with people who are new to computing, including children and older people. Manually placing and sizing windows can be fiddly work, and requires close attention and precise motor control. It’s also what we jokingly refer to as shit work: it is work that the user has to do, which is generated by the system itself, and has no other purpose.
Most of the time you don’t care about exact window sizes and positions and just want to see the windows that you need for your current task. Often that’s just a single, maximized window. Sometimes it’s two or three windows next to each other. It’s incredibly rare that you need a dozen different overlapping windows. Yet this is what you end up with by default today, when you simply use the computer, opening apps as you need them. Messy is the default, and it’s up to you to clean it up.
There are a lot of interesting ideas in what GNOME is working on to address these issues, and it includes a lot of new thinking and new approaches to windowing. I have a lot of reservations, though.
I do not like it when windows do something out of their own volition. A window should be where I put it, and manipulating one window should not make any changes to the shape or position of other windows, unless I’m specifically asking the window manager to do so (e.g. using the side-by-side snap feature, which I never do). There’s nothing I hate more than my UI deciding what’s best for me. Windows should be where I put them – until I explicitly instruct my window manager to put them somewhere else.
I also do not understand this obsession with fullscreen windows. I just don’t get it. Unless it’s a video or a game, none of my windows ever go fullscreen, whether it be on a small 13″ laptop display, or on my 28″ 4K desktop monitor. I find fullscreen claustrophobic, and it almost never makes any sense anyway since virtually no application actually makes use of all that space. You just end up with tons of wasted space. Designing a UI with fullscreen as a corner stone absolutely baffles me.
As such, some of these ideas for GNOME worry me a tiny bit, since they go against some of the core tenets I hold about my UI. I’ll see how it works out when it ships, but for now, I’m cautiously worried.
LOL.
I _always_ work on fullscreen windows, except when I need two windows open at the same time for comparison / copypaste, which is, like, 5% of the time.
Whenever I peer over the shoulder of computer users, I either see people working fullscreen (most of the “professional users”), or people who work in a non-maximized window where the rest of the screen real-estate is just unused and distracting, ie. showing the visible remains of overlapping apps which are of no use at all, Not only those remains bring no information, they actually are a distraction.
I think I’m a fan for tiling window managers for everybody in fact..
2023 and every application thinks it deserves the whole screen that is the problem… as well as advertisements.
Full screen only makes sense for development/publishing/wordprocesssing/CAD or video consumption etc… applications, for those applications in the background, it would make sense to have them pinned to the desktop (think BeOS replicants but just having windows permanently fixed in layer would make sense).
Music apps don’t deserve a full screen for instance.
system monitoring nope…
RSS feeds… nope.
weather nope… etc etc…
There are definitely classes of applications where “being in the background scattered about” makes sense…. you minmize your main application and there they are etc… except most operating systems kinda only half ass the implementation of that.
I feel the same. Full screen let’s me concentrate better. The bottom-right corner of the calculator and the top right corner of the window manager being visible why I am on Firefox or the translation software is just a useless distraction. They’re just an alt-tab away if I need them, anyway.
Fullscreen is nice with large spreadsheets and games,
Tiling window managers like Hyprland for the win. Once you experience them, and the huge productivity, its hard to live without.
The tiling part of it looks quite similar to how it works on Windows 11. Which on the whole is a good thing.
On a laptop with 1 3″ screen i operate in full sized windows 100% of the time. It is just a work flow thing, it’s very easy for me to switch between applications in gnome via meta+# or with three finger swipe up and click or alt tab or alt ` (between windows of same app). Theres almost never an instance where I need two applications in view at the same time.
On my desktop I use dwm because I’ve got a large enough monitor (3840×1600) that I can display two applications, all of their controls and any content simultaneously side by side, or even side-by-side-by-side with the triple column dwm patch.
cmdrlinux,
Personally I find the use case of a reference window plus a working window extremely common: A compilation window next to an editor. Or an internet browser next to a working document, as in blender tutorials and things like that. Or sometimes two internet browsers next to each other. Or running “tail -f logfile.txt” in one window while using a web server. Having multiple file managers open can make some tasks much more efficient than otherwise. I am also a big user of tabs, but it’s not always the right tool for the job.
When I use a laptop, I still find that I have the need to have multiple windows open, but obviously it doesn’t work as well with less real estate and productivity definitely drops for me when I have to continuously switch between windows or tabs to see them.
Every Linux Window Manager redesign: “After much careful consideration, we have decided to copy Windows/Mac”
What I want from the system moving windows by itself is:
1. I want the “window(s) of interest” to be front and centre
2. I want everything else moved in a way that makes sense – I don’t want each centred window piling up in front of the previous centred window
The 1 I can do by myself. For 2 I need the system – doing it manually would make every context switch a multi-step operation.
Workspaces, I use when I start needing them, but I tend to think that if you’re using workspaces it’s evidence that the basic paradigm wasn’t correct (and PaperWM proves that a good paradigm can subsume the need for workspacing). This new Gnome thing has workspacing built in.