Re: workspace vs session

[Milan Bouchet-Valat <nalimilan club fr>]

Le vendredi 12 juin 2009 à 13:20 +0100, Chris Eveleigh a écrit :
> hello,
> 
> big thanks for all the work so far on gnome-shell - it's looking
> awesome and it's great to be able to play with it using jhbuild
> magic.  :-)
> 
> i love the idea of thinking about my computer use in terms of
> 'activities' - i think that's definitely the way to go.  however, it
> looks like gnome-shell re-uses 'workspaces' for activities .. which
> seems wrong to me.  i think a more natural fit for 'activity' is
> 'session'.
The idea behind activities (which we now have renamed to "desktop
contexts" to avoid confusion around this term) is to allow people to use
different sessions (I would not call this that way, but that's part of
the idea) on different workspaces. That means they can use them at the
same time and switch easily. Now, these desktop contexts can be closed
and restarted later - at least that's the plan. If you don't want to use
workspaces, just run a single one - or several using the same desktop
context.


> the key real-world example i've noticed which backs up this thought is
> that i need different views of the same folder in nautilus for two
> different activities.  i just can't do that with workspaces.
That could be a feature, and I don't see why workspaces would forbid
that. Implementing this can be complex and won't be done immediately (if
ever), but it's perfectly possible for Nautilus to know what workspaces
it's on, and how it should behave. At least I'll try to make some apps
follow that rule.

See http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/DesktopContexts for a few ideas
about this.

> i can see that changing from workspaces to something else would be a
> difficult thing at this stage but if the activity model is at the core
> of the gnome-shell design then i reckon it's worth some pain now to
> get the right fit.
This design is not really at the core of the shell. Actually, workspaces
are... ;-)

The problem with desktop contexts is that they're something quite
complex to implement, and we're not sure that's the way to go for all
users. Experimenting with it will hopefully allow us to see what we
should do.

But I don't see why you don't want them to integrate with workspaces at
all. That doesn't prevent you from doing anything, since you can always
avoid using them.


Cheers