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I will never get used to Gnomes lack of native support for minimizing windows. I actually had to lookup how they expected users to manage windows, as it was not

I will never get used to Gnomes lack of native support for minimizing windows. I actually had to lookup how they expected users to manage windows, as it was not obvious to me. Apparently you’re supposed to move windows to another virtual desktop to get them out of the way. As someone who has never really clicked with virtual desktop, this doesn’t work for me. This feels like such a glaring omission of a convention that has been around for decades (even in past versions of Gnome). I was on a call with someone from Red Hat a few months ago when they were sharing their screen, and he threw the windows over to another desktop to get them out of the way, following the design. While he seemed to do it relatively quickly, it looked pretty awkward for something a person would be doing pretty often. It was routine to perform vs a single click to minimize in every other OS. I know minimization can be added with Tweaks, but it always felt a little hacky and buggy.

joelthelion 1y ago
If open windows are bugging you, you can simply move to a new workspace, as you mention. There's a keyboard shortcut, so that's actually very easy to do. Gnome is very different from more common desktop environments, but if you accept to try and work with it the way it's designed, it can be productive and enjoyable.
- jghn 1y ago
  > you can simply move to a new workspace. Like the person to whom you're replying, I don't *want* another workspace, virtual desktop, or anything of the sort. Ever. So a system built around a model of "simply move to a new workspace" doesn't work for me. Period.
  - joelthelion 1y ago
    Then Gnome isn't for you. It's an opiniated desktop, you have to accept its way of doing things.
    - kentonv 1y ago
      I don't use workspaces and I've been a happy gnome user for decades...
  - t_mahmood 1y ago
    Well, is it logical, if you buy an EV, and then complain it does not sound like a sports car?
- torben-friis 1y ago
  Doesn’t that bother you? Honest question, as it feels “conceptually dirty”. There is something of “if the room is too messy don’t tidy it, just move to another room” in it that bothers me.
  - skydhash 1y ago
    You have to think of it like "This desk is busy with some work, let's go to a free desk". So I can have a workspace with my Email and IM clients, one with my music player, another for my leisure browsing, and two each with an editor and a browser for the programming projects I have open. I'm currently on i3 right now and I have 10 static workspaces (6 occupied): 1. Emacs frames (5 of them) 2. Browser 3. Terminal 4. Terminal (temp), but more often have calibre there, and other random gui tools. 6. Music player (cmus) 9. Password manager (keepass)
  - fragmede 1y ago
    You can tidy it up, but mentally it's that there’s a room for activity X and a different room for activity Y. It’s about this mess over here is unrelated to this mess over here.
kentonv 1y ago
What's the difference between "minimize" and "hide"? "Hide" is readily available in the context menu of a window (right-click on its toolbar). (Personally I rarely hide anything, I just have a messy stack of a zillion windows all the time... but I suppose that's not for everyone.)
- MengerSponge 1y ago
  Minimize affects a single window. I expect for "hide" to hide all windows associated with an application.
  - t_mahmood 1y ago
    Which can simply be achieved by switching to another Workspace. The concept is not much different. Just slightly different presentation.
    - MengerSponge 1y ago
      I know I'm being ridiculous, but I don't want all my windows over there. I want them here but invisible. I like keeping work contexts in the same workspace. For example: 1) Email, videoconferencing, internet browsing 2) Coding and simulation 3) Writing
      - t_mahmood 1y ago
        Well, you can simply use `Meta + H` to hide the window too.
  - kentonv 1y ago
    Well... it doesn't. It just hides the one window. (Which personally is what I want. I hate it when multiple windows are grouped together just because they happen to be instances of the same application. For me that has nothing to do with whether or not they are related to the same task!)
0ld 1y ago
it’s just better "think different" than macos
Lapel2742 1y ago
> As someone who has never really clicked with virtual desktop, this doesn’t work for me. This feels like such a glaring omission of a convention that has been around for decades (even in past versions of Gnome). As someone who uses Gnome simply because IMHO the alternatives like KDE are worse, I came to the conclusion that these people do not work on desktop computers. It feels like an interface designed for tablets and laptops you operate by some swipe gestures.
- jetbalsa 1y ago
  I'm a KDE User, by no means a power user. I would love to know what makes KDE Worse over GNOME, I come from Windows Land so its workflows tended to work best for me. but I can see from a MacOS User how GNOME might fit their habits better.
  - Lapel2742 1y ago
    Don't get me wrong, KDE is a great desktop. There is nothing I can point out especially. I do not like the feel of KDE. It's just my opinion, not law.
  - WD-42 1y ago
    It’s the Klutter. Apps with unnecessary taskbars, buttons and menus all over the place. Inconsistent ui. Not exactly great on screen real estate. I think they are making progress but the difference between kde /qt and gnome/gtk is still jarring.
  - al_borland 1y ago
    For me, I tend to run Linux on lower powered systems and KDE was always very slow. Maybe it’s gotten better, I gave up on it and haven’t tried it in probably 10 years, but it just felt much more resource intensive than every other option.
samtheprogram 1y ago
I never minimize windows. They are almost always full screen or split screen (unless I'm quickly grabbing a file in a Nautilus/Finder/Explorer window), and I just hide windows if I really need to. The same is true for macOS. Forget what I do in Windows, been a couple years since I daily drove it. I wonder if that's because I've used macOS and Gnome more than Windows for the last decade -- because its confusing as hell to cmd/alt-tab back to an app or click it in the dock and for its window to not appear because you minimized it rather than hiding it. When that happens, it usually takes 30 seconds until I realize the app is hiding in the task bar or dock.
reddalo 1y ago
I agree. GNOME 2 was simple and beautiful. Then it became completely unusable. It looks like it's been designed by someone who never has to use a computer.
- saturn_vk 1y ago
  > completely unusable You forgot „for me“
_fat_santa 1y ago
IMHO the Gnome team should bake in Dash to Dock and Desktop Icons NG into the core package. To me they are essential to get a proper functioning desktop in Gnome and it blows my mind that they are just 3rd party extensions when really it should be 1st party support. Ubuntu already does this with their build.
- skydhash 1y ago
  What advantages do they bring in so that they need to be baked in? Like a good comparison between what you do with them and how problematic do you think the idiomatic interaction is.
- t_mahmood 1y ago
  Was never a fan of Desktop icons, nor dash or dock. I use none. And I feel they just adds clutter. Only reason I have the top panel visible, because I need to see the time. Heh.
- WD-42 1y ago
  I don’t understand desktop icons. Why spend the time finding the thing, moving your hand to the mouse and clicking when you can just hit super, type the first 2 or 3 characters, done.
  - Lapel2742 1y ago
    Because some times you are doing stuff that is more mouse centric and it is more comfortable to continue using the mouse.
- Lapel2742 1y ago
  Tray icons shouls be supported by default too but won't.
diath 1y ago
Have you tried Cinnamon? I've been happily using it for years, Cinnamon is pretty much GNOME before GNOME started getting bastardized. GNOME these days is pretty much two devs having very strong opinions about how the DE should serve them with no regards to usability or other users; I wouldn't hope that it will improve in the future.
skydhash 1y ago
After years with i3 on Linux, then macOS, then Gnome for a few months, and back to i3 again, that will be a decade since I've minimized any windows. I'm either closing a window if I don't need it anymore or move it somewhere else. I know habits and workflows can be difficult to adjust. But an alternate paradigm can be as useful as the one you're used to.
tristan957 1y ago
I've used GNOME for years, and I'm not a heavy workspace user. I don't remember the last time I wanted a minimize action. If you really do want it, you can use GNOME Tweaks or Refine, which is the modern equivalent. Someone is working on an XDG Desktop Portal setting as well for the window actions. I use macOS at work, and I've used Windows in the past. I still never use a minimize option. Maybe I'm weird, but I've never understood the use for it.
t_mahmood 1y ago
You don't move windows that you do not need right now to other workspace. You move to a new workspace with the window you are working on. Which is more logical, and workspace are cheap, and quick to navigate to. There are even extensions, that opens new windows to a new workspace automatically. But of course, I have few complaints about how multi-monitor workspace are handled in Gnome, I prefer how i3 handles workspace.
- llbbdd 1y ago
  IDK about anyone else's experience but workspaces are not cheap on seemingly any system. Gnome on Linux, MacOS, Windows, all seem to have unacceptable performance degradation the more workspaces you open. I assume that this is because some frame buffer is being kept alive in all cases, but for the love of God, why?
  - t_mahmood 1y ago
    Well, I'll do a small experiment, working on my Surface Pro 3 (Yes, you read that right) which I am using as a Thin client to my desktop. Just opened 14 workspace on it. Opened up terminals, text editor, disk usage tool on all the workspace. gnome-shell is sitting on 154mb, and Firefox is 1.7GB. And I am not seeing any unacceptable performance degradation at all. Put them in same workspace, memory usage seemed to increase slight to 168mb but no unacceptable lag. I put all the window back on individual workspaces again, now memory usage went down to 163mb
    - llbbdd 1y ago
      I'm paying attention, and I have respect for the experiment, but something is wrong somewhere. Conceptually I love workspaces, having tried innumerable forms of spatial window management, and I have tried them across multiple OS's and I always run into this problem eventually where the system lags switching between them (despite apparently low resource usage across the board). For some ungodly reason despite the effort and money involved, OSX is the worst at it. Somewhere greater than 5 workspaces, each managing a fairly small amount of work, it lags like crazy on a powerful machine (M2, 64GB RAM). Gnome will just hang until the workspace has "finished" switching. Windows will switch quickly but will flash every app white until it reloads whatever context it needs to show me the right pixels. I know that workspaces exist somewhere in no man's land between "normal people" (what's a workspace?) and "power users" (who have thirty context-specific keyboard shortcuts for their desktop layout) but it's insane how badly they (anecdotally) perform across platforms. Not that your experiment isn't valuable, I certainly appreciate literally any amount of effort going into this problem, but I do wonder if I'm doing something specific to trigger the problems I'm seeing.
SkiFire13 1y ago
I currently have to use macOS for work and despite it supporting minimizing windows (which Gnome does not) I almost never use it. Part of the reason is how minimized windows are unintuitive on macOS but part of the reason is also that if I don't currently need a window I will likely just put the one I need on top of it, or move to the desktop where the one I need it.

joelthelion 1y ago

If open windows are bugging you, you can simply move to a new workspace, as you mention. There's a keyboard shortcut, so that's actually very easy to do. Gnome is very different from more common desktop environments, but if you accept to try and work with it the way it's designed, it can be productive and enjoyable.

jghn 1y ago
> you can simply move to a new workspace. Like the person to whom you're replying, I don't *want* another workspace, virtual desktop, or anything of the sort. Ever. So a system built around a model of "simply move to a new workspace" doesn't work for me. Period.
- joelthelion 1y ago
  Then Gnome isn't for you. It's an opiniated desktop, you have to accept its way of doing things.
  - kentonv 1y ago
    I don't use workspaces and I've been a happy gnome user for decades...
- t_mahmood 1y ago
  Well, is it logical, if you buy an EV, and then complain it does not sound like a sports car?
torben-friis 1y ago
Doesn’t that bother you? Honest question, as it feels “conceptually dirty”. There is something of “if the room is too messy don’t tidy it, just move to another room” in it that bothers me.
- skydhash 1y ago
  You have to think of it like "This desk is busy with some work, let's go to a free desk". So I can have a workspace with my Email and IM clients, one with my music player, another for my leisure browsing, and two each with an editor and a browser for the programming projects I have open. I'm currently on i3 right now and I have 10 static workspaces (6 occupied): 1. Emacs frames (5 of them) 2. Browser 3. Terminal 4. Terminal (temp), but more often have calibre there, and other random gui tools. 6. Music player (cmus) 9. Password manager (keepass)
- fragmede 1y ago
  You can tidy it up, but mentally it's that there’s a room for activity X and a different room for activity Y. It’s about this mess over here is unrelated to this mess over here.

kentonv 1y ago

What's the difference between "minimize" and "hide"? "Hide" is readily available in the context menu of a window (right-click on its toolbar). (Personally I rarely hide anything, I just have a messy stack of a zillion windows all the time... but I suppose that's not for everyone.)

MengerSponge 1y ago
Minimize affects a single window. I expect for "hide" to hide all windows associated with an application.
- t_mahmood 1y ago
  Which can simply be achieved by switching to another Workspace. The concept is not much different. Just slightly different presentation.
  - MengerSponge 1y ago
    I know I'm being ridiculous, but I don't want all my windows over there. I want them here but invisible. I like keeping work contexts in the same workspace. For example: 1) Email, videoconferencing, internet browsing 2) Coding and simulation 3) Writing
    - t_mahmood 1y ago
      Well, you can simply use `Meta + H` to hide the window too.
- kentonv 1y ago
  Well... it doesn't. It just hides the one window. (Which personally is what I want. I hate it when multiple windows are grouped together just because they happen to be instances of the same application. For me that has nothing to do with whether or not they are related to the same task!)

0ld 1y ago

it’s just better "think different" than macos

Lapel2742 1y ago

> As someone who has never really clicked with virtual desktop, this doesn’t work for me. This feels like such a glaring omission of a convention that has been around for decades (even in past versions of Gnome). As someone who uses Gnome simply because IMHO the alternatives like KDE are worse, I came to the conclusion that these people do not work on desktop computers. It feels like an interface designed for tablets and laptops you operate by some swipe gestures.

jetbalsa 1y ago
I'm a KDE User, by no means a power user. I would love to know what makes KDE Worse over GNOME, I come from Windows Land so its workflows tended to work best for me. but I can see from a MacOS User how GNOME might fit their habits better.
- Lapel2742 1y ago
  Don't get me wrong, KDE is a great desktop. There is nothing I can point out especially. I do not like the feel of KDE. It's just my opinion, not law.
- WD-42 1y ago
  It’s the Klutter. Apps with unnecessary taskbars, buttons and menus all over the place. Inconsistent ui. Not exactly great on screen real estate. I think they are making progress but the difference between kde /qt and gnome/gtk is still jarring.
- al_borland 1y ago
  For me, I tend to run Linux on lower powered systems and KDE was always very slow. Maybe it’s gotten better, I gave up on it and haven’t tried it in probably 10 years, but it just felt much more resource intensive than every other option.

samtheprogram 1y ago

I never minimize windows. They are almost always full screen or split screen (unless I'm quickly grabbing a file in a Nautilus/Finder/Explorer window), and I just hide windows if I really need to. The same is true for macOS. Forget what I do in Windows, been a couple years since I daily drove it. I wonder if that's because I've used macOS and Gnome more than Windows for the last decade -- because its confusing as hell to cmd/alt-tab back to an app or click it in the dock and for its window to not appear because you minimized it rather than hiding it. When that happens, it usually takes 30 seconds until I realize the app is hiding in the task bar or dock.

reddalo 1y ago

I agree. GNOME 2 was simple and beautiful. Then it became completely unusable. It looks like it's been designed by someone who never has to use a computer.

saturn_vk 1y ago
> completely unusable You forgot „for me“

_fat_santa 1y ago

IMHO the Gnome team should bake in Dash to Dock and Desktop Icons NG into the core package. To me they are essential to get a proper functioning desktop in Gnome and it blows my mind that they are just 3rd party extensions when really it should be 1st party support. Ubuntu already does this with their build.

skydhash 1y ago
What advantages do they bring in so that they need to be baked in? Like a good comparison between what you do with them and how problematic do you think the idiomatic interaction is.
t_mahmood 1y ago
Was never a fan of Desktop icons, nor dash or dock. I use none. And I feel they just adds clutter. Only reason I have the top panel visible, because I need to see the time. Heh.
WD-42 1y ago
I don’t understand desktop icons. Why spend the time finding the thing, moving your hand to the mouse and clicking when you can just hit super, type the first 2 or 3 characters, done.
- Lapel2742 1y ago
  Because some times you are doing stuff that is more mouse centric and it is more comfortable to continue using the mouse.
Lapel2742 1y ago
Tray icons shouls be supported by default too but won't.

diath 1y ago

Have you tried Cinnamon? I've been happily using it for years, Cinnamon is pretty much GNOME before GNOME started getting bastardized. GNOME these days is pretty much two devs having very strong opinions about how the DE should serve them with no regards to usability or other users; I wouldn't hope that it will improve in the future.

skydhash 1y ago

After years with i3 on Linux, then macOS, then Gnome for a few months, and back to i3 again, that will be a decade since I've minimized any windows. I'm either closing a window if I don't need it anymore or move it somewhere else. I know habits and workflows can be difficult to adjust. But an alternate paradigm can be as useful as the one you're used to.

tristan957 1y ago

I've used GNOME for years, and I'm not a heavy workspace user. I don't remember the last time I wanted a minimize action. If you really do want it, you can use GNOME Tweaks or Refine, which is the modern equivalent. Someone is working on an XDG Desktop Portal setting as well for the window actions. I use macOS at work, and I've used Windows in the past. I still never use a minimize option. Maybe I'm weird, but I've never understood the use for it.

t_mahmood 1y ago

You don't move windows that you do not need right now to other workspace. You move to a new workspace with the window you are working on. Which is more logical, and workspace are cheap, and quick to navigate to. There are even extensions, that opens new windows to a new workspace automatically. But of course, I have few complaints about how multi-monitor workspace are handled in Gnome, I prefer how i3 handles workspace.

llbbdd 1y ago
IDK about anyone else's experience but workspaces are not cheap on seemingly any system. Gnome on Linux, MacOS, Windows, all seem to have unacceptable performance degradation the more workspaces you open. I assume that this is because some frame buffer is being kept alive in all cases, but for the love of God, why?
- t_mahmood 1y ago
  Well, I'll do a small experiment, working on my Surface Pro 3 (Yes, you read that right) which I am using as a Thin client to my desktop. Just opened 14 workspace on it. Opened up terminals, text editor, disk usage tool on all the workspace. gnome-shell is sitting on 154mb, and Firefox is 1.7GB. And I am not seeing any unacceptable performance degradation at all. Put them in same workspace, memory usage seemed to increase slight to 168mb but no unacceptable lag. I put all the window back on individual workspaces again, now memory usage went down to 163mb
  - llbbdd 1y ago
    I'm paying attention, and I have respect for the experiment, but something is wrong somewhere. Conceptually I love workspaces, having tried innumerable forms of spatial window management, and I have tried them across multiple OS's and I always run into this problem eventually where the system lags switching between them (despite apparently low resource usage across the board). For some ungodly reason despite the effort and money involved, OSX is the worst at it. Somewhere greater than 5 workspaces, each managing a fairly small amount of work, it lags like crazy on a powerful machine (M2, 64GB RAM). Gnome will just hang until the workspace has "finished" switching. Windows will switch quickly but will flash every app white until it reloads whatever context it needs to show me the right pixels. I know that workspaces exist somewhere in no man's land between "normal people" (what's a workspace?) and "power users" (who have thirty context-specific keyboard shortcuts for their desktop layout) but it's insane how badly they (anecdotally) perform across platforms. Not that your experiment isn't valuable, I certainly appreciate literally any amount of effort going into this problem, but I do wonder if I'm doing something specific to trigger the problems I'm seeing.

SkiFire13 1y ago

I currently have to use macOS for work and despite it supporting minimizing windows (which Gnome does not) I almost never use it. Part of the reason is how minimized windows are unintuitive on macOS but part of the reason is also that if I don't currently need a window I will likely just put the one I need on top of it, or move to the desktop where the one I need it.