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"I'm 95% of the way back there now, with Ubuntu with Unity (even got the global menu bar back - yay!), but there are still annoying niggles in my workflow.." W

"I'm 95% of the way back there now, with Ubuntu with Unity (even got the global menu bar back - yay!), but there are still annoying niggles in my workflow.." What you describe sounds very like the way I use dwm/dmenu (suckless tools on Linux) on a small screen. Each application has its own 'tab' (workspace in dwm), those are the private screens. Your 'public' screens sound like the dwm behaviour where you can 'merge' tabs on a temporary basis, then unmerge. There is also 'monacle' and 'floating' mode. xfce4 can also provide 'private' screens by using the alt-F11 keyboard short cut to remove window decorations, so the program uses the whole screen (no panels or window decoration visible) but the program's menu bar still shows. Recent Firefox seems to break this, but LibreOffice works fine. All that is on 1024 by 600. On 1920 by 1080 x2 I just use a lot of stacked windows. Interesting.

vidarh 14y ago
Yes, sounds similar. On the Amiga, all screens can have a backdrop window + floating windows. The backdrop is usually provided by the app that opens the screen, but not always. On public screens you'd usually only use floating windows, but there's no real reason why you couldn't ut backdrop windows there too. No tiling support, though. I was actually planning on installing dwm or another tiling window manager until I had Ubuntu 12.04 installed on my new laptop and decided it was nice enough that I'd try it for a while, and I've stayed with it because enough of the apps I use on it handles very well to strip various chrome when maximized, and most of them are nicely integrated with the new global menu bar. I do use alt-F11 or equivalent for many apps sometimes, but I find it's poorly tuneable for too many apps. E.g. sometimes I want some chrome, like tabs or location bar for a browser visible but nothing else, but the full screen modes for many apps are more "presentation modes" (Chrome on OS-X at least interestingly separates "full screen" and "presentation mode" - few apps do that) It's definitively a way of working that came about due to small screens or low resolutions (the default Workbench screen on the Amiga was 640x256 for PAL and 640x200 for NTSC... 640x512 or 640x400 if you could stand the flicker of an interlaced display...), and that makes more difference on small screens, but these days I tend to use it for larger screens too. Though on larger screens I do sometimes think I'd like a tiling WM again (I used to use Ion way back), so I might just give it a shot. I wonder if any of the tiling WMs would integrate ok with Dash and the global menu bar in Ubuntu, as I actually really like those parts, though... Perhaps it's time to do some testing again.
- keithpeter 14y ago
  The 'hit windows key and type' in Unity reminds me of the dmenu system in a dwm based desktop. There are links around with Unity2d (the QT based version of Unity supported up to and including 12.04) and xmonad. I've not tried those. Unity 3d is basically a compiz plug-in, and so compiz is the window manager. On my bog standard cheap 1080p monitor, I quite like the dwm main left and right stack tiling behaviour. Focus follows mouse with keyboard shortcuts for cycling focus. Mod-m brings the currently focussed window into 'monacle' mode, i.e. full screen. Mod-t sends the window back to its original tiled position. Warning: trying out the dwm/dmenu repo package on 12.04 with Unity lead to problems with incompatible .desktop files, so odd behaviour in a dwm session with no obvious way back to log-in window. I had to stop X, use a tty to uninstall dwm and then got back to Unity. I've not fiddled around to find what the problem was. May have been sorted now. Nice to have all this choice isn't it?

vidarh 14y ago

Yes, sounds similar. On the Amiga, all screens can have a backdrop window + floating windows. The backdrop is usually provided by the app that opens the screen, but not always. On public screens you'd usually only use floating windows, but there's no real reason why you couldn't ut backdrop windows there too. No tiling support, though. I was actually planning on installing dwm or another tiling window manager until I had Ubuntu 12.04 installed on my new laptop and decided it was nice enough that I'd try it for a while, and I've stayed with it because enough of the apps I use on it handles very well to strip various chrome when maximized, and most of them are nicely integrated with the new global menu bar. I do use alt-F11 or equivalent for many apps sometimes, but I find it's poorly tuneable for too many apps. E.g. sometimes I want some chrome, like tabs or location bar for a browser visible but nothing else, but the full screen modes for many apps are more "presentation modes" (Chrome on OS-X at least interestingly separates "full screen" and "presentation mode" - few apps do that) It's definitively a way of working that came about due to small screens or low resolutions (the default Workbench screen on the Amiga was 640x256 for PAL and 640x200 for NTSC... 640x512 or 640x400 if you could stand the flicker of an interlaced display...), and that makes more difference on small screens, but these days I tend to use it for larger screens too. Though on larger screens I do sometimes think I'd like a tiling WM again (I used to use Ion way back), so I might just give it a shot. I wonder if any of the tiling WMs would integrate ok with Dash and the global menu bar in Ubuntu, as I actually really like those parts, though... Perhaps it's time to do some testing again.

keithpeter 14y ago
The 'hit windows key and type' in Unity reminds me of the dmenu system in a dwm based desktop. There are links around with Unity2d (the QT based version of Unity supported up to and including 12.04) and xmonad. I've not tried those. Unity 3d is basically a compiz plug-in, and so compiz is the window manager. On my bog standard cheap 1080p monitor, I quite like the dwm main left and right stack tiling behaviour. Focus follows mouse with keyboard shortcuts for cycling focus. Mod-m brings the currently focussed window into 'monacle' mode, i.e. full screen. Mod-t sends the window back to its original tiled position. Warning: trying out the dwm/dmenu repo package on 12.04 with Unity lead to problems with incompatible .desktop files, so odd behaviour in a dwm session with no obvious way back to log-in window. I had to stop X, use a tty to uninstall dwm and then got back to Unity. I've not fiddled around to find what the problem was. May have been sorted now. Nice to have all this choice isn't it?