God, the fact that stealing focus still exists in 2023 is maddening. Please just let me open windows and apps in the background while I continue to work uninterrupted in the main focus window in the foreground. Even web browsers let you open tabs in the background, why haven’t OS’s caught up to the yet.
That said, I like the concept of this OS design. It reminds me a little of the theoretical concept behind Star Trek’s LCARS interface, where the interface adapts to the user and the task at hand. As a power user I doubt I’d use this myself, unless it could be installed on top of NixOS, but it might be more intuitive and accessible to a more general user base.
It will be hard to get rid of files and folders though, even for general users. As messy as that can get, it’s a simple abstraction burned into just about every human’s brain at this point.
I have the opposite problem. If I open too many Windows, the Windows window manager starts glitching out. When I open an app, it doesn't always come to the front and I have to go alt-tab through dozens of windows to find it. (Sometimes it ends up at the bottom, so alt-shift-tab switches to it... but sometimes it ends up in the middle...)
Also if I open too many windows, opening Windows explorer takes 1-2 or more seconds. Something about exhausting GDI handles?
How many are we talking about here, I'm curious about how many windows is too many for Windows?
I don't often have more than 30 open, and at that point I start thinking it's excessive and that I should probably tidy up to make sure I actually complete a task rather than get distracted.
Asked ChatGPT to write me a script to count the open windows :) I have 164. Although I have quite a bit of RAM left at the moment. The OS getting sluggish is usually what prompts me to close a few open apps. So having lots of RAM is bad for my productivity...
The annoying part is just that Windows explorer gets really sluggish -- to a comical degree. For example, I'll do a file operation (copy, rename etc) and it'll take that same explorer Window 5 seconds to register the operation that it itself performed. Meanwhile, Sublime Text open in the background detects it within miliseconds.
What you're doing with them ? Even on browser tabs I usually (I have vertical tabs addon so it is on the side of the screen) stop when I have full tabbar.
Why are you still relying on alt+tab in 2023? I haven't touched a windows for more than 5 minutes in a long time, aren't there a function to show all windows like in most Linux DE and Mac OS ?
I just looked it up, there's a thing called Task View (Win+Tab) which is this big scrolling view of open window thumbnails.
Curiously, Alt+Tab itself is very slow (half a second of lag?) but if I kill explorer.exe I get a different Alt+Tab screen which is extremely responsive.
(And Win+Tab is, of course, much slower than even the slow Alt+Tab...)
I wish I could just leave explore.exe killed, but it makes it a bit harder to do things. Maybe I should do that, to force me to program my own alternatives in Python. (They'd still be faster than what Microsoft made...)
I disable that functionality on Gnome. Alt-tab to a terminal and alt-tab back to the editor is much faster that displaying all windows and clicking on the one I want to go to. Even two or three alt-tabs are faster than that. Furthermore alt-tab don't move the screen. It only raises a window on top of the other. Everything is still. The Gnome way is to move everything on the screen and move it back to the original place. I don't suffer from motion sickness but windows should stay put where I placed them.
>God, the fact that stealing focus still exists in 2023 is maddening. Please just let me open windows and apps in the background while I continue to work uninterrupted in the main focus window in the foreground. Even web browsers let you open tabs in the background, why haven’t OS’s caught up to the yet.
I3 tiling WM does it reasonable enough; I use it pretty much in "app per workspace" model (with config auto-putting started app on its designated workflow) and if app on other workspace wants focus it doesn't get it, it just lights up a given workspace and app window; there are also config options to explicitly disable all or some windows from taking focus.
> That said, I like the concept of this OS design. It reminds me a little of the theoretical concept behind Star Trek’s LCARS interface, where the interface adapts to the user and the task at hand. As a power user I doubt I’d use this myself, unless it could be installed on top of NixOS, but it might be more intuitive and accessible to a more general user base.
That idea seems to only work where either you build the interface for yourself, or for a specific narrow set of tasks
Focus stealing 100% has a place, just not on app launch and while you're typing. Since switching to Wayland, which doesn't allow focus stealing, I keep thinking apps have frozen when a popup shows up in the background.
Not for me. It's by far the most annoying thing any OS can do, especially that (I think?) every single fucking one have not figured out that it is NEVER desirable to steal focus from app user is currently typing into
In I3 at least it just highlights window and workspace if it is not on currently active workspace, instead of switching focus, so you know app wants something but don't get diverter.
Only thing that should be able to is app that you're using opening another window. There is no case focus stealing of different app is desirable and couldn't be just a notification.
That said, I like the concept of this OS design. It reminds me a little of the theoretical concept behind Star Trek’s LCARS interface, where the interface adapts to the user and the task at hand. As a power user I doubt I’d use this myself, unless it could be installed on top of NixOS, but it might be more intuitive and accessible to a more general user base.
It will be hard to get rid of files and folders though, even for general users. As messy as that can get, it’s a simple abstraction burned into just about every human’s brain at this point.