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 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.
@shapis I agree. I used Gnome for several years before switching to XFCE. Gnome feels like a great DE for people who do not do a lot of things on their computers. I normally have 5 or so workspaces and on each a dozen of apps open. Some apps are workspace-specific, some are available on all workspaces. You are right, multitasking when you do so much is a pain in Gnome. And I really really tried to like it.
Not to mention that you need a lot of extensions to make it useful.
Gnome does great in terms of animations and overall look, but not very practical and feels very non-customizable.
XFCE looks awful out of the box and the lack of animations is quite annoying. But you can make it look good - see our custom distro based on XFCE - TROMjaro. And if you give XFCE a try you will realize how sane it is. You can customize it a ton without being overwhelmed by thousands of options. You right click on panels and apps and you get sane options to move or tweak them.
As for workspaces I personally use them as "names" on the top bar and can switch between workspaces so fast, almost like tabs in a browser.
Not as fancy as Gnome, but boy this is really useful. And practical.
I've also added mouse gestures on my desktop via Easystroke so I can move windows on any workspace via these gestures. So easy.
So I'd say that Gnome looks fancy, and it is very cool for those who do not do a lot of work on their machines and have to switch between many work spaces and lots of apps. And I'd say XFCE is extremely underrated, perhaps because out of the box it looks terrible. Maybe try TROMjaro....see how it goes.
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
I use Dash to Panel to show taskbar icons for running applications, with the topbar moved to a sidebar to save valuable vertical real estate: https://imgur.com/tc0IbuM.png
I use the Workspaces Indicator extension to keep track of which one I'm in, but I use workspaces to focus on specific tasks using groups of applications... not an individual workspace for each application. I normally only have one or two workspaces in use.
I disable the Activities button and Overview completely, with the Super key opening the Applications View directly.
I previously used Arc Menu to replace the Applications View, but dropped that when they added folders to the Application View. It's still a bit clunky, but it's usable now that is supports some minimal organization.
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.
I use many extensions, but I also like this "keep the vanilla simple" approach of Gnome. Instead of trying to support many different workflows, it does only one, and it does it well. Everything is much more polished, compared to other DEs, simply because there's less stuff. And support for extensions seems to be excellent, since there's so many of them and they often work very well.
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.
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.
Decided to try GNOME when i switched to fedora, it's good surface level but the ugliness is in the details
I do. I guess it depends on your workflow though. Gnome tries to get out of the way and is quite minimal. I'm that way too, like to keep my desk uncluttered for example. I couldn't even imagine a task that requires me to have 10 programs open, but if I had to, I guess I would try to group them on workspaces and try to limit the amount. Would be far easier for me to remember that way.
I've tried other DE's and window managers, but they all feel like taking a huge step backwards to me. You should however try to find something that suits you the best, maybe KDE?
I loved kde when I tried it. But felt too buggy to use it on my main laptop.
As someone else already mentioned, using it with a trackpad (for example the Apple Magic Trackpad) is great.
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.
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
I like GNOME better with extensions. My main reason for using it is Wayland.
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