I keep forgetting that virtual desktops are a thing that exists.
Why use a virtual desktop when you can simply buy more monitors?
Facts. Or bigger monitors.
because at least on windows, they just don’t work well
shit always opens on the wrong desktop, they’re slow and glitchy. it’s just a pain
I just have four monitors
very infrequently I use virtual desktops for particular things, but too often I need to see the secondary shit while doing the primary and also have a meeting or tertiary info up while accessing chat
Similarly on mac, there’s an animation that it has to finish before releasing controls back to the user. Ubuntu has snappy ones
Settings > Accessibility > Display and then toggling “Reduce Motion” on.
That just disables most if not all animations though, no? The OS should really just be able to handle the inputs during the animation…
I just confirmed that it only disables the animation, controls are still locked for the same period. Apple time and time again puts feel and looks in front of usability, another example is their magic mouse charging cable placement
Wow, that’s worse than I expected.
I usea a tiling wm(sway) so workspaces are part of my workflow. 1: browsers 2: terminals 3: terminals(part 2) 4: chats(XMPP, LXMF, email…) 5: IDE(helix) 6: games(supertuxkart) 7: keepassxc 8: Tor browser 9: misc 0: music
Let me fix that for you
How I use virtual desktops:
I don’t. Everything fits on one screen, if it doesn’t I close tasks and leave a note to get back to it.
I am one of the people that never uses them, and I think I finally realized why: ADHD.
I usually turn them off, and if there’s a part of the GUI dedicated to them, I disable that too. I thought it was to save screen space, but honestly I think it’s more so that I won’t lose windows to virtual desktops I forgot existed.
I think the tendency to forget things and to occasionally space out and forget what I’m doing has led me to value persistent visual artifacts of whatever I’m doing. That means a visible taskbar with the clock, system tray icons, and application icons, plus terminal windows even if they are idle. Somehow, scanning back and forth across 4 monitors – even if virtual desktop people reading this can do it much faster their way – just works better for me.
This touches on something that’s actually much deeper that I have been doing for myself:
Sometimes if you do things in a way that plays nicely with your personal neurospice cocktail rather than the more efficient way you “know” that you “should” be doing them, it just makes your life better and that is the whole damn point for why we are working on the computer in the first place.
I can absolutely see myself buzzing around virtual desktops with keyboard commands. I have experimented with desktop setups in the past. I remember for a while in college I was running some kind of 3D desktop program where I had a virtual space where I could move windows and icons around. You could hang images floating in the air like paintings. And this is on 25 year old hardware! I think my GPU was a Geforce 2 GTS. Giga-texel shader baby!
Tabs for nerds
This post made me look into virtual desktops on my laptop and I can easily double the current amount of desktops from 2-4 under settings.
Biggest problem with that is that I almost never use more than my first virtual desktop unless I’m working on multiple things and need to switch to not get caught working on one of them over the other.
Awesome WM so independent “workspaces” per monitor.
Central monitor:
- browser for searches, gitlab, articles, lemmy
- IDE
- maybe another IDE
- some other term…
- signal
- spotify … goes up to 8
Side monitor:
- browser with email/communicators/discord/docs
- runtime so cargo, node, actual app running
- additional term
- additional term… … goes up to 8
Laptop: Just one workspace with terminal
I’d really like independent workspaces per display. I haven’t explored how to set it up in my current environments (I use primarily KDE, sometimes Gnome, and still occasionally XFCE). I’m not sure it’s even possible. I understand there’s quite a bit of customization of workspaces coming with Cosmic, but I haven’t checked it out.
I do have some resistance to tiling window managers. Primarily because my wife occasionally uses my computer, and I can already see her rolling her eyes in frustration at me. How’s the learning curve for awesome?
I tried KDE and it’s really great but independent workspaces are still work in progress. For me that’s a deal breaker. When those are done I will definitely consider it. With gnome I was able to setup workspaces on one monitor and have a single workspace on the others which is better then what KDE is doing. I don’t think you can make them fully independent.
I don’t think you should be that worried about tiling. In awesome you can switch between tiling and floating windows (per workspace), you can set rules for specific windows or just make floating the default. You can make some apps always go fullscreen. It’s not really that confusing.
Learning curve for awesome is pretty much the learning curve for Lua. All configuration is just Lua scripts. The great part is that you can change pretty much everything. The not so great part is that to change anything you have to dig in Lua. When I switched I did a really deep dive and pretty much spend all of my free time writing scripts for couple of weeks. So yeah, it’s work but the level to which you can customize everything is simply amazing. “I want this widget to display a popup on hover instead of click.” 30 seconds and it’s done. Custom widgets are super easy. Custom bars, different bars per monitor, different bars for different number of displays (think laptop with and without external screens); all super easy.
I have 3 screens:
- Main screen for whatever i’m doing incl Browser
- Gaming screen wiith Steam and Heroic Launcher
- Comms - Signal, emaiil, discord, everything KDE Connect
- random shit not fitting anywere
- Piracy town: qbittorent, jdownloader, Browser with MANY sources
The second one has many many status widgets, Dolphin, fSearch and a Firefox window that’s my media player, always in the background without any title bars or borders running the deezer webpage as WPA
The third one is connected with a 10m HDMI cable and is not running often, is just used to watch movies :-)
Desktop 7 needs to pull themselves by the bootstraps and get a job. Useless.
I got a 3x3 grid and now I swim accross them so naturally, visually and intuitively that I cannot stand anything else, 1 for spotify/system properties, 2 for firefox, 3 for thunderbird, the rest thematic for ocassional folder and dedicated programs, any one (two for diagonals) shortcut away from any other (win_key+arrows, with ctrl and shift combinations for window movement/fitting)… I will never comply back to anything else
I use Super Key + A and S instead of the arrow keys to be able to do it with one hand.
I have this set up and recently transitioned to using the numpad to jump to desktops so it’s always one move
I don’t even remember them. And KDE also has this activity whatever thingy that I don’t know what the hell it does.
Activities let you change the desktop layout, panels, wallpapers, etc.
Virtual desktops keep the desktop settings
Thank you, but why? Why do I do that? It sounds like a whole separate desktop session then?
It can be useful if you want a different desktop layout for different use cases
I set up a Personal activity, and a Work activity, with different backgrounds and different apps pinned to the taskbar. That helps maintain a “virtual” separation of work and personal life, and helps me not screw off on discord as much
Well, it would if i actually used it
Now I know what it is for. Thank you.
For me it’s:
- Workstuff
- Games
- Main browser for mail, etc.
- All the messenger apps
Music player lives in yakuake dropdown terminal.
Desktop 1: The things I need to do (applying for jobs) Desktop 2: The other things I should do (building relevant career skills) Desktop 3: The things I actually do (random hobbies & volunteer work) Desktop 4: I have no fucking clue, maybe reddit?
shit dude, I’ve got more than 4.
- comms(chat/email/tickets)
- remote desktop access
- terminal/editor
- primary local development browser/console
- primary research/notes/documentation
- project 2 research/notes
- project 3 research/notes
- project 4 research/notes
- infrastructure migration project lead by PM
- browser for stupid shit/music
