One important missing piece is having information on the maximum desired size of a window. This is the size beyond which the window content stops looking good. Not having this information is one of the reasons that traditional tiling window managers have issues, especially on larger screens.
I have been upset over losing this functionality from the classic Macintosh days for decades now. This was built into the Macintosh OS going back to at least System 7. Clicking the “expand” button in the title bar would expand (or shrink) a window to its optimum size. For Finder windows, that meant the smallest size that could display all the files without scrolling (if possible).
Developers had to implement logic to make it work. For the most part, they did, and it worked very well up through OS 9.
Then came OS X. The green button, at first, worked exactly the same way it did in OS 9. The problem was that even Apple didn’t give a damn to write any logic for it into their apps. It might as well have been a “randomize” button. Users got frustrated. Windows converts wondered why there was no “maximize” button and blamed the very concept of expanding rather than Apple’s now-piss-poor implementation. Longtime Mac users wondered why we effectively lost a very useful feature.
Over the years, Apple continued to neglect the function of the green button, and third-party devs largely followed suit. Eventually Apple changed the default behavior of the green button to go into full-screen mode, hiding the original (still mostly broken) “zoom” functionality behind an Option-click. At this point, the the difference is effectively “full screen” vs “windowed full screen”. RIP the classic Mac OS expand function.
Moving maximized windows to their own workspace seems like a really cool idea. Workspace management is one of the things I struggle with so I usually just end up with way too many tiled windows on a single screen when they could be moved around more efficiently.
That’s pretty much how MacOS does, but I wouldn’t call Mac’s window management good by any means.
Are they going to rethink putting thumbnails in the file selection dialog or many of their other insane decisions?
Gnome seems like they want to take the Apple approach to UI design without the attention to detail that Apple’s UX has.
I always disliked Gnome because of this and also because it seems like the developers want to force their tastes and use cases to everyone else. You either learn to work their way, or move out. That’s one of the many things I like about KDE, despite the devs having their preferred default way of doing things, they leave options for the users to decide in an easy way (i.e. having everything in the settings menu, without needing to download and install a separate program or manually editing config files)
putting thumbnails in the file selection dialog
Could you elaborate what you by this?
When you pick a file to upload or open from inside another application, the GTK/Gnome file picker does not allow you to have a thumbnail view of all the files. It is a meme in the Linux community at this point since there was a bug filed in 2004 asking for this feature, some even writing patches to make it work. Gnome devs refuse to change how the file picker works however.
- in the file manager, you can see thumbnails of images and videos
- in the file picker (ie. “Open File” dialog box), you only see the filetype icon
Looks really interesting, hopefully this can be a step forward for window management as a whole
I’ve been using paperwm on gnome for a couple years now, it’s my preferred paradigm for tiling. This looks like it has a lot of the same influences, so I’m interested in seeing where it goes
PaperWM really should be its own DE. It’s so good, almost perfect, but held back by its nature of merely being a GNOME extension.
niri
I love the direction this is going, I’ve been using i3/sway for years and gnome apps recently became awesome in tiling mode because of their responsiveness. If this is implemented this could definitely get me back on gnome 👍
