GNOME Devs Are Working on a New Window Management System (gnome.org) 114
Managing windows — "even after 50 years, nobody's fully cracked it yet," writes GNOME developer Tobias Bernard:
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...
We've wanted more powerful tiling for years, but there has not been much progress due to the huge amount of work involved on the technical side and the lack of a clear design direction we were happy with. We now finally feel like the design is at a stage where we can take concrete next steps towards making it happen, which is very exciting! The key point we keep coming back to with this work is that, if we do add a new kind of window management to GNOME, it needs to be good enough to be the default. We don't want to add yet another manual opt-in tool that doesn't solve the problems the majority of people face.
The current concept imagines three possible layout states for windows:
- Floating, the classic stacked windows model
- Edge Tiling, i.e. windows splitting the screen edge-to-edge
- Mosaic, a new window management mode which combines the best parts of tiling and floating
Mosaic is the default — where "you open a window, it opens centered on the screen at a size that makes the most sense for the app." (Videos in the blog post show how this works.) "As you open more windows, the existing windows move aside to make room for the new ones. If a new window doesn't fit (e.g. because it wants to be maximized) it moves to its own workspace. If the window layout comes close to filling the screen, the windows are automatically tiled." You can also manually tile windows. If there's enough space, other windows are left in a mosaic layout. However, if there's not enough space for this mosaic layout, you're prompted to pick another window to tile alongside. You're not limited to tiling just two windows side by side. Any tile (or the remaining space) can be split by dragging another window over it, and freely resized as the window minimum sizes allow.
So what's next? Windows can already set a fixed size and they have an implicit minimum size, but to build a great tiling experience we need more... At the Brno hackfest in April we had an initial discussion with GNOME Shell developers about many of the technical details. There is tentative agreement that we want to move in the direction outlined in this post, but there's still a lot of work ahead... We'd like to do user research to validate some of our assumptions on different aspects of this, but it's the kind of project that's very difficult to test outside of an actual prototype that's usable day to day.
"There's another issue with GNOME's current windowing system," notes 9to5Linux. "If the stacking is interrupted, newly opened windows will be opened from the top, covering the first opened window." For this new windowing system to become a reality, the GNOME devs would have to do a lot of user research and test numerous scenarios so that everyone can be happy. As you can imagine, this could take months or even years, so if you want to get involved and help them do it faster, please reach out to the GNOME team here.
We've wanted more powerful tiling for years, but there has not been much progress due to the huge amount of work involved on the technical side and the lack of a clear design direction we were happy with. We now finally feel like the design is at a stage where we can take concrete next steps towards making it happen, which is very exciting! The key point we keep coming back to with this work is that, if we do add a new kind of window management to GNOME, it needs to be good enough to be the default. We don't want to add yet another manual opt-in tool that doesn't solve the problems the majority of people face.
The current concept imagines three possible layout states for windows:
- Floating, the classic stacked windows model
- Edge Tiling, i.e. windows splitting the screen edge-to-edge
- Mosaic, a new window management mode which combines the best parts of tiling and floating
Mosaic is the default — where "you open a window, it opens centered on the screen at a size that makes the most sense for the app." (Videos in the blog post show how this works.) "As you open more windows, the existing windows move aside to make room for the new ones. If a new window doesn't fit (e.g. because it wants to be maximized) it moves to its own workspace. If the window layout comes close to filling the screen, the windows are automatically tiled." You can also manually tile windows. If there's enough space, other windows are left in a mosaic layout. However, if there's not enough space for this mosaic layout, you're prompted to pick another window to tile alongside. You're not limited to tiling just two windows side by side. Any tile (or the remaining space) can be split by dragging another window over it, and freely resized as the window minimum sizes allow.
So what's next? Windows can already set a fixed size and they have an implicit minimum size, but to build a great tiling experience we need more... At the Brno hackfest in April we had an initial discussion with GNOME Shell developers about many of the technical details. There is tentative agreement that we want to move in the direction outlined in this post, but there's still a lot of work ahead... We'd like to do user research to validate some of our assumptions on different aspects of this, but it's the kind of project that's very difficult to test outside of an actual prototype that's usable day to day.
"There's another issue with GNOME's current windowing system," notes 9to5Linux. "If the stacking is interrupted, newly opened windows will be opened from the top, covering the first opened window." For this new windowing system to become a reality, the GNOME devs would have to do a lot of user research and test numerous scenarios so that everyone can be happy. As you can imagine, this could take months or even years, so if you want to get involved and help them do it faster, please reach out to the GNOME team here.
Scalable windows (Score:2)
What I want is a way to scale a window (shrink/enlarge) .. For example, if (press a button and) drag a window corner to resize a webpage or document .. I want the text and layout of everything in that window to be unchanged except for of course the zoom level. Sort of like how the MacOS Expose feature shrinks windows except I want to do that with specific windows. This is useful for viewing and cutting and pasting from multiple PDF documents for example. Of course there should be a way (gesture?) to snap e
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That's more of a app thing than window management thing.
WMs don't control the content (inside) of windows.
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The WM can control it though, unbeknownst to the app..
Re: Scalable windows (Score:1)
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Text zoom is really hard if you don't have the font information to work with. Especially if the text was subpixel-rendered.
If you don't need to be able to read the zoomed-out text, it will work just fine though.
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Depends on how it's done. Already with HiDPI and scaling, the app will adjust the text size and scale images. All that's needed to make this work is have each window surface have its own DPI and scaling factor. If we can make scaling having crisp text on hidpi systems, we could do it per window too.
Re: Scalable windows (Score:2)
Compiz fusion was able to zoom in any part of the desktop a decade ago.
You defined the magnifying glass size and the shortcut (super + scroll wheel for example), and you could zoom on anything easily.
There is no reason a compositor today couldn't do that at the window level.
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The old fashioned X way that I would approach this feature request is that I'd define a new Atom for zoom notification. Application windows can optionally register to receive a zoom notification event from the WM. If a window does not have this Atom registered in their Protocols, then the WM could take extra steps to fake it. In a compositing window manager this is very easy to render, just stretch the texture to fit the real window size. The backend is a little messy because you'd want the app to think it
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Yea this is a great idea. I'd love for this to be a standard part of everything. The host document should have no way to figure out it is going on, either, so it can't go and resize itself to stay small, or jiggle all the text around, or break a font, or fingerprint a browser, or totally hose the layout, or flicker. It should be impossible for it to know it's happening, ideally.
Re: Scalable windows (Score:2)
Use compiz.
Compiz does most of the stuff most people want to do with their windows and it definitely does what you are asking for here.
I used to use it with emerald, which is super pretty
No no no (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason window management is left to users is that we know where we want them. I donâ(TM)t want âoesmartâ systems guessing where I want them and I donâ(TM)t want them moving around.
Open windows where I left them. Let me save arrangements and switch between them. Save arrangements on a per-monitor-layout basis. Give me tools to move and align but do not do it for me.
Re:No no no (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No no no (Score:4, Insightful)
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Because the app knows better than you. No matter what you're up to do, how many displays you've got or what size they are, the app will decide.
Yep, and just remember "Root access allows you full control over the device that you purchased, and a lot of app developers don't like that" [slashdot.org]....
Re:No no no (Score:4, Funny)
You dont understand... these devs know that they are clever and know that they are right about the window position the clever code generated, regardless of what you claim
Is that you Lennart? :-)
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In general very few window managers remember window positions. And tiling is good until you get one of the windows behind all of the
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There's a little known utility called devilspie and its successor devilspie2 that basically lets you position windows exactly how you want it,
https://www.nongnu.org/devilsp... [nongnu.org]
If you want your application to always start on a specific location on a specific monitor, that's the way to do it. And if there are floating windows or palettes or such, those too can be precisely positioned so they're always opening in the same location.
I mean, everyone has their own way of laying out the windows - some windows go in
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Do you actually have multiple windows on one screen at the same time? Everyone I know just full screens everything, and if they need to have multiple windows visible, they get a monitor per visible window. A few use the side-by-side feature to have 2 windows share the same screen.
Re: No no no (Score:3)
It drives me nuts when Iâ(TM)m viewing colleagueâ(TM)s screens when Iâ(TM)m trying to help them and they compulsively full screen each window. Itâ(TM)s 95% wasted space, but more importantly, itâ(TM)s difficult to refer back to other windows whose content they need. Donâ(TM)t get me wrong: thereâ(TM)s a place for full screen, especially on smaller displays, but I only need it for certain tasks. On a big screen, starting somewhere between FHD and 4K, I rarely need it.
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Do you actually have multiple windows on one screen at the same time?
Yes, every day all day! I do have a second display, too, but it doesn't remove the need for multiple windows, since I can have as many as 10 windows open at any given moment.
Re: No no no (Score:2)
I tend to have dozens of Windows open, and rarely Fullscreen.
Not everyone's workflow is centered around 2-3 Windows.
Re:No no no (Score:4, Interesting)
Personally I usually have at least 10 small windows about post-it sized, and a few bigger ones. I like having little self contained areas where something simple gets done, in the unix way of doing one thing, and doing it well. It helps keep repetition to a minimum, and it helps with context-switch-amnesia.
And yes, I have 3 40" monitors side-by-side-by-side.
Re: No no no (Score:3)
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Overlapping is not ideal, but it is not at all rare for me to have a dozen dozen or so windows open while actively using a ha
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Overlapping is what I am used to and prefer Often, I just size/position the windows so that something like 5mm part of a window pokes out from under the currently active window. It makes easy to switch between them while having even more windows open that I am not using right now (so, using the taskbar or alt+tab to switch between windows is inconvenient).
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Open windows where I left them.
By all means do that, but also give me the option to easily move them where I want. You can crap over the mosaic idea all you want, but the ability to automatically mosaic windows in Windows 10 was probably it's single best feature. (well left and right is hardly considered mosaic but Windows 11 expanded on that)
Re: No no no (Score:2)
The challenge with gnome in general is that whenever they have an idea, they tend to remove some customization or functionally in pursuit of that idea.
So adding a mosaic arrangement and even making it default might be fine, but people may get rightfully concerned about loss of function, or if gnome didn't have a feature they like, as unlikely as getting it before was, it's even less likely when gnome developers have an "idea".
I personally love searching for windows by text, as compiz and kde implement, but
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Yeah, I took a look at the article and watched the short little concept videos. It would drive me insane to open a new window and then have everything automatically re-arrange itself. Not useful, especially since most of the time we use a single maximized window at a time anyway..
Windows does tiling way better. Things typically open maximized, if I want side-by-side windows then I can do that manually, when I need it. Simple, to the point, works fine.
I'm all for innovation and experimentation but I don't se
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I suppose I've gotten used to MS windows now and it seems fine mostly, the shaking a window to minimize everything else catches me out every now and again. The thing I truly hate about windows is that it re-assigns the input focus to suit its wants and to hell with the user. I often wonder where all the passwords go that I typed in and never showed up on screen, they're apparently not in some other window, it's as if the input focus is often just set to nothing, or to a window that doesn't accept any input
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left to users
Absofrickinlutely! The reason why desktops have issues is that they get in the way of the user, or they decide they are smarter than the user.
For example, from the article:
...at a size that makes the most sense for the app...
The size that makes the most sense for the app is the size the app says to make the bloody window, and not a millimeter larger or smaller, thank-you.
As you open more windows, the existing windows move aside to make room for the new ones
Why? I want my windows to stay where I put them, thank-you. I have enough problems when I move a window half off the screen and window managers assume that means I want them to suddenly p
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"New windows obscure old ones" (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, so? That's exactly what happens on your real desktop/workspace, the paradigm upon which the last 50 years of graphical computing desktop window managment has been based.
"Most of the time you donâ(TM)t care about exact window sizes and positions and just want to see the windows that you need for your current task. Often thatâ(TM)s just a single, maximized window. Sometimes itâ(TM)s two or three windows next to each other. Itâ(TM)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 itâ(TM)s up to you to clean it up."
Yes... it's up to me. And no... if all I want to see is the one window I am (or need to be) paying attention to at the moment, I maximize it. I don't care what's underneath it, just like I don't care what's on my real desktop that's underneath (or off to the side) of the thing I'm working on. And if what I'm working on changes, because I decide it should or because someone/something else decides it should, I rearrange... put the new window or piece of paper on top of everything else and focus on it. Real world, virtual world... same thing.
"Automatically do what people probably want, allow adjusting if needed"
Until they invent computers that can actually read my mind... how the hell is it supposed to automatically know? And, oh, by the way... doesn't that describe the current desktop windowing environment? Operating on a small set of both fixed (and adjustable) prefixes, with the ability for the user to (in most cases) arrange and resize the windows to suit their needs and desires?
Porting the physical desktop environment into the graphical computing environment is an example of a killer application (remember those? [wikipedia.org]). What is being described in the linked Gnome discussion is, in my opinion, not. Not, at least, until they produce a demo and before it is forced into the next version of Gnome as "the default", > 90% of the computer-using population opine that this is the greatest thing they've ever seen since sliced bread.
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Until they invent computers that can actually read my mind... how the hell is it supposed to automatically know?
Yeah, that part sounded extremely tone-deaf to me. They are quite literally saying "we know better than you what you actually need or want" -- no, you fucking don't. I, for example, have a terminal window open practically always and I like having it in the bottom-right corner of the display, tucked away from whatever else I've got going on. Currently, it always opens up right where I left it at the size I left it, exactly how I want it, but GNOME's new approach sounds like I'd have to adjust its size and po
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While you aren't wrong, bad GNOME 3 dev decisions often have a pretty big blast radius. GTK-3 is all fucked up because of them, and my XFCE boxes suffer as a result- often having shitty file pickers and other strange things that suddenly stop obeying XFCE standards and instead do their own awful crap. By bleeding into non-DE parts of the system they force other DEs to either except their particulars as normal or roll their own stuff that used to just be part of a standard Unix system.
The more popular they
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It can't, unless it observes everything you do and learns your idiosyncratic preferences.
Except... Microsoft already tried that in the 90s. And that one single idea almost destroyed their Office business by making the product completely unusable. Luckily they changed direction and the rest is history.
People don't like smart software, everyone thinks they do, but they don't. What people like is dumb, dependable sofware that does the same thing over an
I have a mix (Score:2)
I've become quite okay with doing a setup each time I boot up. I make up two layers of tiles that don't fill the whole 4k desktop. Text editors as one set of tiles with consoles, tabbed file manager and tabbed web browser on the other layer. The overhanging of the two tile sets allows quick click bring to front as needed.
There is stacks of PDFs also but these I minimise or close and only bring up as needed during coding.
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PS: Importantly, the 4k monitor is 43".
gTile rocks (Score:3)
https://extensions.gnome.org/e... [gnome.org]
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Thanks for the link. That might be just what I've been looking for!
Holy jesus catfish no! (Score:2)
The most infuriating part of my day is, whenever I happen to be using a machine running a "smart" window manager, is avoiding the sequence or operations that sets it off into "i know better than you" mode and maximizes or tiles or otherwise adulterates my window layout because I dragged something too fast or to close to the edge of the screen.
Maybe no one's cracked it because no one has the precognitive ability to know what millions of users will need over thousands of sessions in the future. Maybe it's bes
I hate tiling and "autoarrangement" nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
If we need anything, it's TABS.... For Windows, the best new innovation was the introduction of tabs to File Manager and Notepad.
When I put a window in focus, it's in focus. It's in front of things. The whole "flat UI" garbage makes things worse in that we no longer get shadows beneath the focused window, the titlebars are often left untouched (or just a slightly different pale shade). A good UI just needs to tell me where my current work is focused on, and in an age where we often have multiple monitors (I have a 3x4k monitor setup), it might be nice to have better visualization aids for finding my cursor, too.
I hear what you might be saying... "but... but... we are making drag-and-drop easier" - except NO, you aren't. If I have to drag something held in my cursor over a screen of real estate to get to another "tile" I'll probably lose it on a system doing an IO-freeze. Also, I want my windows because they show me EXACTLY the amount of information I want and need to see when I am using it. Tiles reduce my landscape, and make applications unusable at the volume I have open.
People can already tile their windows. Leave the rest of us alone and stop trying to remove our options.
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Tabs.... let's put them at the bottom of the screen on its own dedicated bar, so you can switch between various tasks.
Task....Bar?
Re: I hate tiling and "autoarrangement" nonsense (Score:2)
Or why stop at one level of tabs..
Go with fully recursive (also searchable, with history) task bars. :)
Re: I hate tiling and "autoarrangement" nonsense (Score:2)
GNOME is unusable enough as it is (Score:1)
A sure fire way to make it even more unusable is to channel Microsoft back when they thought it was a good idea to turn the Windows desktop into a tablet UI. Be sure to include a series of magical hidden gestures to allow users to "easily" and "effectively" interact with the new WM.
Oh no!!! (Score:2)
I window might open and cover an existing window and I might have to manually move and/or resize something? Oh, the horror. /s
Here's the thing, for me anyway. I don't really care where a window initially pops up or what size it is as long as they're both fairly reasonable. If the position/size is not to my liking, I'll change it. At that point, I'd simply like the app(s) to remember that for the next time they're opened.
Real life example, I can't fathom why -- using the same remote X display -- "gnome-
eye tracking (Score:3)
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Hahaha even if it could be made to work sure accurately, that would get annoying quickly without some mitigational work/AI especially if you frequently type wile glancing at a different window/document. It'll be even more annoying than X-Windows where the focus followed the mouse pointer. Not to mention it will fuck off many web pages that have onFocus triggers (though I suppose you could restrict it to per window..
Re: eye tracking (Score:2)
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you could set focus to change by looking then blinking. Nod your head to minimise. Shake to close. Close one eye to trigger a zoom, use your imagination.
Great, when all of the blinking lights gives someone a seizure the computer will have one too.
When you need to constantly reassure / placate your micromanaging boss you'll also need to explain why the work you're supposed to be doing isn't on your screen.
When dust gets in your eye, you'll be suddenly zoomed in on some guy's crotch in the employee picnic photo that is your desktop wallpaper.
I think my imagination would reject such messed up UI behavior.....
Re: eye tracking (Score:1)
You need to post more stories.
Gotta get back, back to the past (Score:4, Insightful)
"If the window layout comes close to filling the screen, the windows are automatically tiled."
Windows 1.0 lives!
This is why (Score:3)
This is why I still use fvwm, using ~/.Xdefaults and fvwm's PositionPlacement I can make windows appear where I want them to, including on specific desktops.
So I do not need something deciding for me were to put windows. If only applications use a standard that has been around for over 30 years, there would be no need to reinvent the wheel every other year. BTW, the only reason I need PositionPlacement is because many new applications ignore that standard.
The Spatial Way (Score:4, Insightful)
Gnome devs are totally fucked, and I'm old enough to remember how they tried to cram "The Spatial Way^1" down our throats. Never again. They lost all my trust and reinforced that decision a dozen times over by now. They haven't gotten any less arrogant since then. Their bug reports are often "we removed because we personally don't use that feature, and neither should you. Closed and marked as Working As Designed. Patches not accepted. Thread locked because y'all can't behave."
^1 "The Spatial Way" was their genius idea to make the default window management scheme modal, like old Windows 3.11 days: you'd double click a folder in the file explorer and it'd open a new window, not change the current window ("explorer style"). You'd then have to close the previous window or hold down control when double-clicking. They had a giant list of reasons why disliking this was actually stupid and you were a legacy user if you preferred it that way. http://www.bytebot.net/geekdoc... [bytebot.net]
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I offer a hard agree. I don't care how much time and effort is being spent as I know it is all wasted effort until someone comes along afterwards and gleans a 'lessons learned' from whatever bullshit the Gnome devs come up with.
I have no idea what is broken about that organization, but somewhere around Gnome 2.0, they went off the rails into stupidity. I would suspect a Microsoft mole, but the Gnome team is so incompetent, I don't think Microsoft would be wasting their money there.
Are they serious? (Score:3)
Window layout was the reason I switched away from Gnome when Gnom3 came out. Kde was better, but Gnome2 was even better (so was Kde3). So I switched to Mate. (Kde has too much magic running under the hood.)
FWIW, outside of bugs, I preferred Gnome1 over Gnome2. Kde3 was better than either Kde2 or Kde4...also better than Gnome2. These days when I don't use Mate, I use xfce, but I use a lot of KDE apps. I can't think of a single Gnome app that I still use.
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These days when I don't use Mate, I use xfce, but I use a lot of KDE apps. I can't think of a single Gnome app that I still use.
No Gnome app or no GTK app? For a Gnome app you would need all the desktop installed, but there are a lot of GTK apps, like Gimp.
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OK, I occasionally (once every other month) use Gimp. I can't think of any other GTK app I use. There probably are some, perhaps geany, which I use every day, but it's not obvious that they are GTK apps. And it's likely that I have gnome installed, as I think Debian does that by default, but all the apps that are obviously associated with it are terrible. (That said, Kate is a lot worse than geany. It used to be better, but then they switched to that atrocious sidebar thing for scrolling. I think they
Look inside the box / snippets / automation (Score:2)
Normally, often all we need from a window is smaller rectangular snippets within it. But the window cannot be resized to just that small section. So we are stuck with a large rectangular area taking up screen space.
Other times, all we need to know is what sections of a window changed. Like a Unix 'watch' command, but for GUI applications.
One approach is to have only the snippets take up desktop area. The rest of the window could be made partly transparent and stackable.
Other times, I want to automate a GUI
Get rid of windows for smaller screens. (Score:2)
I want want windows to exist if I am on a certain type of computer with a large screen. On the 12 inch laptops I love and take everywhere, I literally want no windowing, just a graphic stage, then on the bottom of the screen a dialogue area, which can be anything from tabbed shells to large language model chats, but with the capability to do things on the stage. Kind of like Jupyter, where code outputs images, itâ(TM)s about the interplay between script and stage. Some tabs or something to switch betwe
Why don't they do something useful (Score:4, Insightful)
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I've always assumed they think that doing things like making changing settings intuitive is beneath them.
Tiling: Just Say No (Score:5, Interesting)
"We've wanted more powerful tiling for years..." No, *we* have not. At least I have not, and I am part of us. Tiling is the *last* thing I want, and it sounds like this mosaic view is not what I want either.
What *do* I want? Floating. I want a new window I create to float on top of previously opened windows. If I want to be able to see or even three windows at a time (out of the five or six I might have open), I want to arrange them; I don't want the computer to second guess where I want things.
I say yes to tilling (Score:2)
I'm not sure about their mosaic though.
Make it maximally user configurable. (Score:3)
Linux is not Windows. Let the professionals who use it have maximum choice then get out of their way.
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Watch actual users and pick the trends (Score:2)
The developers have a pretty poor track record of developing useful interfaces. Gnome never became relevant on mobile devices, and yet there was a bunch of innovations in this area which trashed traditional desktops.
Our workplace uses gnome and RHEL or Rocky, most of the windows managers behave badly at some point. I know where I want a window, it depends upon my task and area of focus, I tend to use two, three or four windows when completing as task, plus a web browser. Our workplace standardised on ~40inc
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Yeah, what we really need to improve "tiling" is a way to snap windows position / size into a virtual grid, not by smart automation but by easy to access manual operation.
Speaking of that, Compiz already has a bunch of key bindings for setting window position / size. It's just less intuitive as one need to find / remember them.
Sigh (Score:2)
Just use KDE (Score:5, Insightful)
The KDE project learned hard lessons way back with v4. Since then they have been extremely conservative with their desktop and refined it to be a full featured, lightweight, consistent environment that looks and behaves the same reliable way from release to release, and delivers a classic, straightforward and productive desktop. They do not indulge the sort of iconoclasts we see here in this story gearing up to wreck Gnome again. Please consider revisiting KDE if you were put off years ago; if you have an open mind and a willingness to work with it for a short amount of time I promise you will arrive at a peaceful, comfortable place with your Linux desktop.
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That said, the KDE team did something against the users: removing the ability to set the window's border width & color, and the gradient & color & 3D texture for the window's title bar. (I'm against the flat design for clarity)
It's maddening how developers remove user's freedom, and in the GNU/Linux ecosystem, no less... The Gnome team is one of the worst here. Firefox is next.
Sorry for the rant.
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The KDE project learned hard lessons way back with v4.
Do they still have the unremovable 'ear' icon thingy on the desktop? The KDE devs are almost as braindead as the Gnome devs. I simply can not believe those two teams are THAT fucking incompetent.
If I wanted something indexing my fucking files for a 'search' later, I would have enabled it... but no, you forced it on me. Fuck you. I won't use your software even if it is free.
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Wrong problem! (Score:5, Insightful)
My pet peeve is with popping up-front and stealing focus, when I am *actively typing* in the previously focussed window; the WM should keep the newly-created windows in the background and not give them focus until I have actually stopped typing, after which the WM would be free to bring the windows up-front in the order of creation and give focus to whichever one requested it last. Having a window pop up right in the middle of you typing e.g. a shell script or whatever and interrupting you may not seem like a big issue to someone who doesn't do such a thing often, but it is a very jarring thing and breaks one's flow -- irritation hurts productivity.
At least personally, I wish they'd fix focus stealing instead of fucking around with tiling and positioning. Then again, I haven't liked GNOME to begin with since 3.x -- the last good GNOME was 2.x!
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At least personally, I wish they'd fix focus stealing instead of fucking around with tiling and positioning.
If Microsoft has it, it must be valuable and worth preserving and/or copying imitating. This is non-negotiable. Focus WILL be stolen, especially when you are about to enter a password into a website.
Wait a sec, let's go full conspiracy.
This feature is a must have because US intelligence agencies use this trick to gain initial entry into your computer.
Nevermind. Even I can't believe that for more than half a second.
Regardless, it is utterly fucking weird how intensely mainstream window managers reproduce th
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Full size (Score:1)
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Here's a good reason for me: Reference. .pdf of that submittal open, obviously. I'm going to have the excel file I use for the review stamp and to write comments on open. If this was a resubmittal with corrections, I'm going to have the previous submittal open. I'm going to have the specificatio
Say I'm reviewing a product data submittal. I'm going to have the
Stop! (Score:2)
No (Score:5, Insightful)
I am tired of those developers thinking they know better and forcing their questionable design to everybody. I was a happy Gnome 2 user and hey ruined it with Gnome 3. This described scenario sounds like a nightmare to me. I want my windows to open in the exact same place at the exact same size I left them last time. And if I have a window open, never ever move it automatically.
Losing the plot (Score:2)
They have lost the idea of mechanism vs policy. At the level of mechanism, what we want is a window management system that does what it is told,
and makes this relatively easy and painless. It should be easily scriptable, easy to send messages to via the command line, or other things (OSC everywhere
is a concept I'm currently obsessed with). The kind of thing that xdotool does, (sending arbitrary events to windows); being able to tell it to produce a tiled layer in which some windows are to be put (this is ho
Good for the Gnome people (Score:2)
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really? (Score:3)
better work in VR (Score:2)
I think they should work on AR/VR interfaces, as the inexpensive glasses are showing up and most would switch to such interface once good enough - IMHO.
The windows placement problem can only be solved by AI, as some people are just messy and no matter the available OS options sooner or later they'll end up with dozens of windows often many for the same app.
BTW - sorry, but most of these "new" features are available as configurable options in some other UIs.
Gnome... needs more extension update/install work (Score:2)
I have used Gnome on RHEL as my desktop from the beginning when redhat first started using it... It really needs some work in some areas.
Want to install more extensions? You do that through the web browser but there are complications... You get this notice on RHEL 9...
"To control GNOME Shell extensions using this site you must install GNOME Shell integration that consists of two parts: browser extension and native host messaging application."
Ok fine... install that extension which is pretty painless. No
everything I dont want haha (Score:3)
I'm reading this blog post and watching the videos and am about to have a seizure. It's all the default behavior I don't want.
I open apps that I need and then place them in the context I want to use them. That differs based on what I'm doing. My browser could be in a dozen different orientations depending on if I'm blogging, reading, watching videos, or doing a quick search. I can't and don't expect a window manager to have any clue how I want this. If I open up a calculator, I don't want it to shift other windows around. Same with a terminal.
Windows 11 window management is quite good in this regard. Open on the focused screen (if multi-monitor) and then I can snap to the grid I want if I want, or use keyboard shortcuts. Macos +Magnet get's me the same. Various linux environments also offer really similar and highly functional systems.
It's not disorganized/mayhem by default. It's flexible like a desktop/laptop computer should be. Notice how tablet OS' haven't replaced the desktop environment with their 1-app or tiling arangements? Because they aren't universally functional, great in one context, not so great in many others.
FVMW2 - already does a simple mosaic layout (Score:2)
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The biggest drawback to using FVWM2 is that I didn't write it myself.
Pretty much the main excuse used by every developer that writes an X window manager.
The statements are quite wrong (Score:2)
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.
I'm quite strict about the position and size of all my windows, to allow adequate display of the content as well as the ability to see information on multiple windows at the same time.
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.
Actually I always have a minimum of several windows open, having a dozen is quite often for me. Multitasking baby!!
"a great tiling experience" (Score:2)
And our dreams continue to continue to diminish.
PHI tiling (Score:1)
I have been thinking about this for a while an interesting idea for a tiling window manager would be to render all windows to a square size and use the golden ratio to arrange them into a golden rectangle. You render them into a square the size of the largest square and use a compositor to scale the others down. Then use hot keys to rotate the windows thru the spiral to change windows. You could have config options to start top/left or bottom/right and whether to spiral CW or CCW. You could have the window
Window systems are shams (Score:2)
ColumbiaU. was bent on window system that frankly was rudimentary compared to NeXT(circa1990) but it dragged ComSci majors and carried the budget surely.
Apple lobotomized the NeXT unix window system for a pedantic ‘80’s Macintosh functionality. In retrospect, NeXT OS was too powerful, too permissive and unsupportable technically. It was built on the design brief that IT administration would be operating and supporting the systems enterprise wide.
Todays MacOS X is as much as retail users can hand
Gnome 3 is great, I failed to see the problem. (Score:1)
This is just looking for problem where there is none.
Just keep the current Gnome updated and stable.
That is all.
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> I'm pretty much happy with Gnome 3 [...] Just keep the current Gnome updated and stable.
Remember how, when the gnome devs released Gnome 3 and fucked over all the existing users who were happy enough with Gnome 2 (telling anyone who complained "you're a fucking idiot because you're too stupid to understand our Glorious Vision")?
Well, welcome to the club. With any luck, there'll be a decent fork or clone implementing all the stuff you like within a year or three.
choice (Score:2)
i read a lot of comments from people who do not want this.
simply don't use it then, that is the power of linux, you'll have plenty of other choices to pick from that will not use this window managing technique.