Tux Machines

GNOME: Rethinking Window Management

Posted by Rianne Schestowitz on Aug 01, 2023,

updated Aug 02, 2023

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=> ↺ Tiling BoF in Brno during the HDR hackfest. Left to right: Robert Mader, Marco Trevisan, Georges Stavracase, Jakub Steiner and Allan Day (remote), Florian Müllner, Jonas Dreßler

Window management is one of those areas I’m fascinated with because even after 50 years, nobody’s fully cracked it yet. Ever since the dawn of time we’ve relied on the window metaphor as the primary way of multitasking on the desktop. In this metaphor, each app can spawn one or more rectangular windows, which are stacked by most recently used, and moved or resized manually.

The traditional windowing system works well as long as you only have a handful of small windows, but issues emerge as soon the number and size of the windows grows. As new windows are opened, existing ones are obscured, sometimes completely hiding them from view. Or, when you open a maximized window, suddenly every other window is hidden.

Over the decades, different OSes have added different tools and workflows to deal with these issues, including workspaces, taskbars, and switchers. However, the basic primitives have not changed since the 70s and, as a result, the issues have never gone away.

Read on

=> ↺ Read On: GNOME

Also: GNOME project considers adding window tiling by default

=> ↺ GNOME project considers adding window tiling by default

iTWire:

It's 2023, but GNOME is still trying to reinvent the wheel

=> ↺ It's 2023, but GNOME is still trying to reinvent the wheel

The post appeared on the American news aggregation site Slashdot a few days back, and the first few comments were not exactly complimentary.

"The reason window management is left to users is that we know where we want them," wrote one commenter. "I don't want 'smart' systems guessing where I want them and I don't want them moving around.

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