desktop/workspaces terminology issue

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Hi,

This is maybe a minor point, but has come up a lot as I work on
pager/WM sort of stuff. Maybe you already discussed it too, I don't
know. ;-) 

I think "desktop" is an awful name for the things displayed in a
pager, as in "switch to desktop 4 with Alt+F4."  "desktop" means
"desktop environment" or it means the background of your screen where
icons are displayed. There's only one desktop where you can save
files. Icons are always the same on that one desktop. etc.
So we already have two overloaded meanings for desktop; we shouldn't
add a third.

I suggest using "workspaces" for the window manager feature where you
have different windows on different workspaces.

Note that window managers distinguish "viewports" and "desktops."  I
don't think we should have both; we should pick one, and call it
"workspaces." The distinction between a viewport and a desktop barely
makes sense to me, and I've written a window manager.  Basically the
viewport/desktop split is just an artifact of WM authors not being
able to decide how to implement workspaces.

Havoc