Re: Gnome-Shell - questions and opinions

[Bojan Smojver <bojan rexursive com>]

On Mon, 2011-01-03 at 17:52 -0500, Owen Taylor wrote:
> When you go to the overview in Git master, you see all the windows of
> the current workspace spread out before you and no windows of other
> workspaces.

Which is a problem in itself. No visibility.

> You can switch workspaces:
> 
>  - by clicking on the workspace squares at the bottom of the screen 

And after that by finding/clicking on my window on the workspace I want,
after it has been moved and resized by expose.

Current workspace switcher does two things better:

1. Shows windows the way they really are.
2. Uses logical orientation for layout of workspaces, which is in line
with animation in compiz (left-to-right). (I'm referring here to
jimmac's mock-up to have workspaces in top-to-bottom layout, which
doesn't make sense for something that's left-to-right).

There is also the question of distance here. I have to travel all the
way to the bottom to do a workspace switch. It would make more sense to
have these closer to Activities button.

When it comes to actually switching windows on a single workspace (which
is the primary function as you said), I get your point. Essentially
Activities means expose. If we had workspaces laid out closer to the
Activities button (i.e. near the top of the screen, see my mock-up),
with proper visual representation of windows on the "workspace switcher"
and the ability to actually switch directly, I think I wouldn't even
look at expose style windows below.

-- 
Bojan