This is the place Linux could shine. High productivity desktops. Windows and Apple computers are mass production items. Even semi-illiterate people must be able to use it. We need a desktop for highly skilled technical workers. One we that allows us to quickly switch context, to have a lot of info in the screen, one that works well with very big screens. A jet pilot has a specialized interface, why not programmers could have one?
Hey, I always wanted a desktop that tracks my gaze!!!
It's already there on Linux with tiled window managers. You can quickly switch between different contexts with work spaces, almost no pixels are wasted and it scales beautifully with high resolution screens.
Our gnome-shell plugin https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM actually implements the tiling aspect of this mockup. Although we allow partially visible windows and mixing tiled and floating windows.
This project seems interesting. I usually use a 4x4 grid on i3. I wonder if your pluggin can handle this kind of grid. From the pictures, it seems like new windows are arranged vertically only, as columns.
Yes, new windows is added as columns, but it's possible to manually tile two (or more) columns into rows after.
Adding some sort of toggle that opens new windows as a new row is certainly possible. Interesting idea to open in new row if the current column only has X windows and new column otherwise :)
This rule could also be window type specific. Eg. if the current window is a browser open in new column. If its a terminal, new row.
I do the same on KDE with the grid-tiling plugin [0]. You can also configure the rows/columns inside each workspace (I use 2x2 for max 4 windows per workspace).
meta+WASD/arrow keys to move in the workspace grid, plus a 4x4 square on my keyboard mapped to each individual workspace, hold down alt too to bring the current window with you.
meta+Q/E to resize the active window, and meta+tab is like alt-tab but for workspaces. meta+ctrl+WASD/arrow keys to swap window positions.
meta+F/T to toggle floating/tiling, useful for calculators etc. Floated windows always stay on top.
I wish workspaces had shortcuts like alt-tab and superkey-<number> only look at your current workspace.
If I'm on workspace 2, and my superkey-1 corresponds to an application that is only open on workspace 1, i don't want to switch to workspace 1, i want to open a new window of the application in workspace 2.
Similarly, if I'm in workspace 2, I don't want alt tab to show me applications open in workspace 1.
To me, these behaviors make workspaces inadequate for context switching.
This can be done, depending on the window manager.
In my awesome window manager setup, super+tab always toggle the last 2 windows on the current tag (workspace). It's also possible to map super+1 to make an application be part of the current workspace (or open a new instance there). In this model, a window can be part of more than 1 workspace at the same time.
It's also there on MacOS (mostly). Amethyst as a tiling window manager + Alfred makes for a great productivity combo. With both of them, most of the pain points in the article are adequately solved already.
That's an excellent point. Having a higher lowest-common-denominator to cater to will definitely make for an interesting UI. The sweet spot is to match the UI specialization with tangible productivity gains. All the modern UI simplifications slow me down tremendously. Gestures are crazy slow compared to clicks and keyboard shortcuts. Even something universal like pinch-to-zoom, I can do it faster with mousing over the place where I want to zoom, hit control and scroll to zoom in/out. Also, I think having a voice command based AI would amazing - with the caveat that it actually works of course :).
Perhaps. I have been thinking about it, but from what I've heard wayland still has some shortcomings. I'm sort of deferring this decision to the i3 dev: when/if he decides to port i3 to wayland (or pass the torch to sway) then I as a user can probably be sure that it's ready.
Well, you can do a lot of crazy stuff with Linux Desktops and it certainly is a good platform for trying new ideas. Nevertheless, if you want to be productive, just take KDE and STFU. Sorry, I didn't mean to be rude and if you like Gnome/Unity better, just go for it.
It is just my personal experience that you can do all sorts of customizations, but in the end, the productivity killers are not your overlapping windows but your news and social media pages.
So what I am using is quite simple:
- Standard KDE window management (kwin) for Firefox, Thunderbird, Okular, Libre Office, Gimp, etc.
- Yakuake with tumx + vim (productivity)
- Virtual desktops, when things get crowded (rarely need more than 3)
The only feature I am missing (about once per year) is the tabbed-window we had back in late KDE 3.
I think linux had the best desktop for a very long time now. Maybe it's not as accessible to casual users but objectively speaking tilling window managers, workspaces etc have been really next level if you're a developer.
Hey, I always wanted a desktop that tracks my gaze!!!