Gnome is Rethinking Window Management

According to the comments here, innovation should not happen because we already have something. It seems everything needs to be a Windows clone with extra settings and worse UI for it to be considered here. Nothing clean or new that could genuinely help the Linux desktop adoption in the mainstream. The FOSS Gatekeeping continues as always.

I think it is kind of sad that so many people are opposed to such innovations as this is truly what we need as an OS if we want it to be mainstream: differentiating features and a distinct experience. Not a clone that makes people think "oh it looks and behaves mostly like Windows, so it must work just like it!" and then run into a brick wall. I think the main reason people who switch to MacOS succeed and stay and even love it is because 1. MacOS is really easy to learn and 2. People go in not expecting to be like Windows, instead they expect to have to learn a whole new workflow.

If Linux could have such an experience I really think it could help sell the idea of Linux as a separate OS experience/product rather than something that looks and feels like a slightly worse Windows with no telemetry and no forced updates.

Yeah, GNOME is fine. I used KDE for years and got tired of the jank, so now I'm back in GNOME. It's fine, it launches applications, browses files,and tells me the time, which is about all anyone really needs from a desktop environment. It does a lot more too.

I think it's a great experience. It's not for everyone, but nothing is. Use what makes you happy and cheer on projects that fit others' needs, because the more people use Linux with different configurations, the more functionality we'll all get and the more bugs will be fixed.
- The beauty of Linux is the freedom you get to do whatever you want. What's not so beautiful however is the people that will tell you the choice you made is wrong and you should feel bad about it and that you are stupid for using not what they chose to use.
Replacing something that works fine, just because it's old, with something targeted specifically for children is not an innovation. It just makes me fight my tools instead of using them to do my job.
Sounds like a great design direction to me. I'm excited to see how it turns out.

This is very well thought out, I'm excited to try this.

I'm always cautious when GNOME says they're reconcepting a process that we're happy with. I'm curious to see where this goes but unfortunately GNOME already lost me to KDE :(

I worry that the changes will forced.

Automatically do what people probably want, allow adjusting if needed

This is probably the thing that irks me the most about it. Most everything I open remembers where it was last time I opened it and just goes there. So I only have to decide once where and how big I want a window to be, generally. I don't want that to be contextually different depending on what else is open the vast majority of the time either, so I don't want to fight with my DE over where and how big a window should be.

I don't know, to each their own I suppose. Tons of people seems to like Gnome, so I don't want to hate on it... But it feels like they are making a DE for people that don't want to learn to use a computer, people that have mostly only used tablets and phones, or people that want the device to make the decisions for them... Which doesn't sound at all like the people that are switching to or already using Linux. I don't know, I have to assume I am just missing the magic something that Gnome provides to others.
- To give what I hope is an apt analogy: Imagine you have desk where you do all your work. Every other DE handles this desk like a human would just putting stuff everywhere, moving and grabbing as needed.
  
  This proposal and gnome in general take that desk and make it an auto-sorting desk so you can always grab what you need as fast as possible at all times without doing any organization yourself. Oftentimes I use a lot of different apps sporadically so having something that can auto-sort them is a dream come true.
  
  The real magic of gnome is A: how pretty and polished it and the apps are and B (arguably more important): how little you have to fight it to get work done. I spend zero time thinking on gnome, I just hit the super key or three finger swipe and what I want is done. This proposal brings me even more of that. I’m like 2x more productive than my windows coworkers and most of that is due to gnome.

Gnome devs have a nasty habit of "rethinking" things while ignoring tons of usability issues. I'd like them to stop rethinking things until they addressed those first...

You're right! All other developments should be stopped and all further innovations halted until separated workspaces on multiple monitors is addressed. As the most popular issue on Gitlab, this is clearly where the shoe presses.

Really bothers me when people waste their time creating new features of free software when existing software don't even meet the well-established universal criteria for perfection yet. What a waste.
- I would love for this to be a thing, but as long as the WM stays EWMH compliant (like most full blown DEs right now), it won't happen. It's the one thing keeping me on true tiling WMs. I want virtual desktops to be tied to a monitor, not an X display.
- New bridge syndrome. New bridges are exciting, less cruft to work through, and you get a ribbon cutting ceremony. Fixing pot holes is expected and you make drivers mad shutting lanes down.
  
  That said, volunteers that are up to it, bug fixes (and creating good bug reports too) and documenting code is generally seen very appreciatly by code maintainers, but for users of unpaid for FOSS products, you're going to get bugs and people will fix them when they feel like it.
  
  If users want bug fixes in a certain time frame they need to pay somebody for SLA to fix bugs.

I have never understood why gnome seems to the go-to choice for default DE for so many distros

Why not? It works pretty well.

KDE is janky, and most of the rest are kind of limited in functionality. GNOME just works.

I actually switched to GNOME recently because Wayland works just fine with it and KDE seems to crash, despite me having an AMD GPU. I want it because I have two monitors with different refresh rates and one supports FreeSync, and GNOME Wayland handles it perfectly, whereas KDE doesn't even launch. I don't know of any other DE that would work well with my setup.

I don't particularly like GNOME, but it works well. I used KDE on openSUSE for >2 years now, and I always seemed to run into random bugs and whatnot. I switched to give it a shot after years of using GNOME on Arch, and now I switched back to GNOME on openSUSE and those janky problems went away.

I'd love for KDE to work well, it just gets in my way too much. GNOME just works, so I use it. Maybe I'll go back to a tiling WM (maybe Sway?) at some point, but since my kids use my computer, I'll probably put off doing that.
- In my experience, KDE works well and gets out of my way, while gnome does stupid shit and is non-configurable. I don;t have multiple monitors with different refresh rates so I can;t comment on that, but I do not run into bugs in KDE often at all!
  
  (I mean I did accidentally lock up my computer by opening several hundred copies of the screenshot app, but that was my fault - I accidentally put a banana on the print screen key!)
Because it just works and looks really good out of the box. Its the only DE with good, seamless fingerprint support for example
- I didn't know that about fingerprint support, but my experience of it is it not working but getting in the way, and looking a bit pants compared to kde
Old history - Qt had licensing concerns, gtk+ was guaranteed FOSS, so major distros shipped Gnome2 by default, and it stuck.
- Yeah I know, i was there (and I always preferred KDE... migrated to it from Windowmaker of all things, I never could get the hang of Enlightenment, pretty though it was). But that was sorted literally decades ago!
it has less information on screen at any given time than stock dwm so it looks clean an professional on screenshots
- Hmmm, I guess that's plausible. Awful reason, but plausible
- So does openbox /s

" Traditional tiling window managers solve the hidden window problem preventing windows from overlapping. While this works well in some cases, it falls short as a general replacement for stacked, floating windows. "

In 10 years of working with tiling WMs productively on a daily basis this has been an issue exactly 0 times. Even in a world that is tailored to non-tiling WMs they just perform better. Period.

I used i3wm for some time, configuring default placements based on window metadata and used it for work. after some time I realised I'm 40 years old and shit like this is a waste of time. I just want it to think for me
- I relatively recently switched from ion3 to hyprland - not having a predefined layout with rules where windows go was a bit weird at first, but got used to it pretty quickly. I have a bunch of rules about which desktop specific applications should go, but other than that just use dynamic splits at the cursor location, and then move windows around as needed.
In 10 years of working with tiling WMs productively on a daily basis this has been an issue exactly 0 times...

...for you.

Different people have different needs.
Seems like using a window manager could be a whole rabbit hole. Where do you begin?
- start with i3wm/sway or openbox. openbox is a floating window manager so it should be more familiar and i3wm is a tiling window manager. personally i use kde nowadays but i always preferred tiling window managers when i chose to use one. it all comes down to your choices so first see if you prefer tiling or floating window managers and then go from there
- I'd recommend sway and waybar. Waybar offers some cool customizable templates. Currently I also use bemenu as a launcher and dunst/poweralertd for notifications. I make heavy use of stacked or tabbed layout during general use.
  
  sway has pretty decent mouse support, but for optimal productivity try to get used to the keyboard shortcuts. As soon as moving/resizing windows and changing desktops becomes muscle memory it's a whole different ball game.