Linux

I think it works best if you have a lot of screen real estate. My sweet spot is around 5120x1440p (either ultrawide or two monitors) with about 5 desktops. I never overlap windows and it works amazingly for me.

I used to do this with Gnome, nowadays I use the exact same workflow in Mac OS, and I feel super productive with it. I haven't used alt tab in about a decade now 😃

For me, it only works with good keyboard shortcuts for the following:

1. Quickly moving between desktops (for example, super + )
2. Quickly moving windows between (for example, super + shift + )
3. Quickly snapping windows to areas in the current desktop (for example, super + arrow keys)

It's pretty decent for me with ten virtual desktops (and each one mapped in a sequence from Alt+1 through Alt+0). Text editor always in the first desktop, browser in the second, music in the third, etc. What's nice is that you can (almost) replicate the same workflow if someone forces you to use macOS or Windows at work

As someone else already mentioned, using it with a trackpad (for example the Apple Magic Trackpad) is great.

Switching between a few workspaces looks cool, but once you have 10+ programs open, it becomes an unmanageable hell that requires memorizing which workspace each application is in

I think a big part of the problem is Gnome's limitation of a 1-dimensional workspace list. I don't think I'd be able to use that many workspaces in a flat list, Gnome/Mac style, though I find a 4x2 grid of workspaces manageable. But of course I use a DE that has options. :)

and which hotkey you have each application set to.

I wonder if this is also part of the issue. If you're arranging windows spatially across workspaces, it seems antithetical to use shortcuts to skip directly to one window or the other vs. moving through workspaces. Again, quickly navigating workspaces spatially is easy when your workspaces can be arranged into rows, and not just as a single long list.

When I used it, I mostly switched between the 9 apps in my favorites/dock with the Meta+digit shortcuts. I rarely used anything besides those 9, and then I just used alt tab. It worked really well, no complaining.

Today it's mostly the same, but with a tiling window manager and the same numbers: 3 is thunderbird, 5 is file browser for instance. It's muscle memory at this point, feels great.

Gnome 3.38 (vertical workspaces) was peak workflow. Primarily use super+tab to switch applications. Workspace overview is mainly for moving apps around or opening new apps. You should never need to whiz through the workspaces looking for an app. I never have more than 4 workspaces and usually only have 2. It would be nice if the top panel could be more useful or take up less space, but I must be able to see the time at a glance.

I hate vanilla gnome but love it once I've tweaked it. I definitely have to arrange workspaces how I like them though. 2 side by side terminals on wkspc1. 2 side by side file browsers on wkspc 2. However many browser windows on 3. Whatever main program I'm using on 4 and maybe PDFs on 5. Gnome makes it a breeze to fly around the workspaces on a laptop.

I used to use GNOME with minimal plugins (like adding a tea timer or my local ip to the top bar), until they changed the vertical layout. It was a while ago when I was going though some older issues I posted on the GNOME issue tracker and I realized I haven't used the desktop switching feature since they changed it. They move horizontally now and it just doesn't work for me on 3 monitors. It's like the adjacent monitors switch into each other, but they don't.

Now I use dash to dock. I tried a plugin to reinstate vertical desktops but it's buggy as hell.

Also, GNOME doesn't remember window states and positions anymore since the latest version, which annoys the hell out of me. I feel like every new version is equal parts forwards and backwards. Things get better and worse.

One final fuck you to the guy who decided that dead keys and diacritics should be shown while you're creating them. That's decades of muscle memory out the window and switching between other os's just got worse because of it.

Decided to try GNOME when i switched to fedora, it's good surface level but the ugliness is in the details

I find the GNOME workflow very intuitive and have grown really accustomed to it over the years. It's minimal and gets out of the way, while at the same time everything I need is accessible on one keypress through the activities overview.

I don't feel at home on any other desktop environment. Even on Ubuntu I revert everything to stock GNOME.

Gnome, 2screens, 3 workspaces.

Heavy user of Dock number shortcuts, as well as keyboard swap workspace shortcuts and window resize/splits.

Discipline is good for workspace organisation, I know which "space" contains which groups of applications.

I personally slap pop-shell and flypie radial menu on it, and I really love it

Me on both desktop and PC, but I don't think I've had 10 windows open at any one time tbh. Or that any particular DE would perform significantly better if you really needed to work with 10 windows simultaneously. That's a problem I would fix with additional monitors.

I would also have windows snapped to half screens on the workspaces, so I really only need 5 workspaces. Considering I have a 3 monitor setup at home, I don't think I'll have too much of a problem since I can have 6 windows up at once. Still, juggling 10 bloody windows is going to be annoying whether it's GNOME or not.

• https://lemmy.world/comment/843554
• https://lemmy.world/comment/626513
• https://lemmy.world/comment/623221
• https://lemmy.world/comment/599202
• https://lemmy.world/comment/571496
• https://lemmy.world/comment/574017
• https://lemmy.world/comment/269076

I like GNOME better with extensions. My main reason for using it is Wayland.