I usea a tiling wm(sway) so workspaces are part of my workflow. 1: browsers 2: terminals 3: terminals(part 2) 4: chats(XMPP, LXMF, email…) 5: IDE(helix) 6: games(supertuxkart) 7: keepassxc 8: Tor browser 9: misc 0: music
I keep forgetting that virtual desktops are a thing that exists.
Why use a virtual desktop when you can simply buy more monitors?
Facts. Or bigger monitors.
I am one of the people that never uses them, and I think I finally realized why: ADHD.
I usually turn them off, and if there’s a part of the GUI dedicated to them, I disable that too. I thought it was to save screen space, but honestly I think it’s more so that I won’t lose windows to virtual desktops I forgot existed.
I think the tendency to forget things and to occasionally space out and forget what I’m doing has led me to value persistent visual artifacts of whatever I’m doing. That means a visible taskbar with the clock, system tray icons, and application icons, plus terminal windows even if they are idle. Somehow, scanning back and forth across 4 monitors – even if virtual desktop people reading this can do it much faster their way – just works better for me.
This touches on something that’s actually much deeper that I have been doing for myself:
Sometimes if you do things in a way that plays nicely with your personal neurospice cocktail rather than the more efficient way you “know” that you “should” be doing them, it just makes your life better and that is the whole damn point for why we are working on the computer in the first place.
I can absolutely see myself buzzing around virtual desktops with keyboard commands. I have experimented with desktop setups in the past. I remember for a while in college I was running some kind of 3D desktop program where I had a virtual space where I could move windows and icons around. You could hang images floating in the air like paintings. And this is on 25 year old hardware! I think my GPU was a Geforce 2 GTS. Giga-texel shader baby!
Reminds me of compiz in the old school days. The desktop cube was the (impractical) shit!
Can’t tell from the screenshot (need moar pixels), but that reminds me of the old software that would give Windows XP, 6 workspaces… It was so amazing but would utterly kill my old PIII with 192MB of RAM.
How I use virtual desktops:
I don’t. Everything fits on one screen, if it doesn’t I close tasks and leave a note to get back to it.
I don’t “get” virtual desktops. I mean I’ve tried them out and don’t care for them. I’m curious if those who do are using single monitors or low resolution?
I can’t stand virtual desktops. I have 4 monitors specifically so I can have as many things visible at once at possible without switching. I work from home so this is my machine I use for everything. 1 monitor for main task or games, 1 for side tasks, 1 for media or even more side tasks, and 1 exclusively for work and personal chat. My top monitor is very large so I often have 2 or 4 different things going on at once side by side on that one. I disable virtual desktops and tiling windows on every operating system I’ve used.
If my GPU had more outputs, I would have more monitors. I also have a 2nd computer with a single 1080p monitor to the right (I have an L desk) for home network stuff, usually keep my security camera feed on that one.
I respect anyone who does use virtual desktops because I acknowledge that if you master the workflow, it can be more efficient if you have more than like 5 or 6 tasks going at once (vs 4 monitors), however I will die on the hill of never ever using them.
Just buy one giant high resolution TV. Same amount of pixels, similar DPI, but no bezels.
I’m using a 4k 48" OLED, with no scaling. So windows and text are “normal” sized but I have a huge amount of space for multiple windows.
Then you can configure zones, using them like virtual monitors, and just shift + drag windows around and they snap into the zone. Different layouts act like different monitor configurations.
It takes some getting used to but I can’t go back to multiple monitors now.
There’s a certain divide I’ll have where, I might want my CAD software, reference material etc. all open, and that can easily spread my two monitors, and then if I’ve got communication stuff like email, slack etc. open it’s easier for me to mentally switch to a different place to do that. Much more than my big center monitor and two others and that’s more than my visual field and I don’t really want to use my computer looking all around the room with me, trying to find the damn mouse cursor.
I use them to both maximize desktop space for multitasking (my monitor splits evenly into two 4:3 windows side by side) and keep my tasks organized, as I tend to let my brain wander of distracted. Been using i3 for like a decade now.
I never used them when i was still using a DE, but now as a tiling window manager user i use them all the time, since the point of those is that windows are placed in a layout and don’t overlap, so after opening like 3 windows max, it gets too cramped for my taste and i move to a different workspace.
I use a lot of virtual desktops and yeah, I genuinely disable other monitors, if I sit at a workplace where I’d have two.
One 4k, two 1440p physical monitors with 4 virtual desktops at work
What OS are you on? Virtual desktops on Mac and windows are just terrible. On Linux I’ve been using virtual desktops on Linux since the 90s and when I see my colleagues on Mac using a single desktop with 20 windows trying desperately to switch between windows I just shake my head.
I use dynamic virtual desktops and have a separate desktop for every task. That keeps me focused on that task, but also lets me easily jump to something different. I couldn’t imagine trying to be productive any other way.
CachyOS lately.
i used them a lot when i had 1 monitor and did more than one thing at a given time, then never needed more than 1 again after getting a second monitor
Depends on your workflow. I’m usually using a i3wm or sway environment so I can put windows side by side, but on my ultrawide monitor it usually is best to limit that to two windows (usually a couple of browser windows or a browser and a terminal). I also often have a text editor open as well, so it helps if I can open that on another desktop, and quickly switch to it as needed. My main goal isn’t to really minimize anything, just switch desktops because I find it easier to just switch around. In windows I generally don’t use desktops as I find their goal is more to have you minimize stuff which I find kinda annoying because I have to resize the window or something when reopening them.
I don’t like them on any OS besides macOS. For me it just makes visual sense.
They were all the rage in the CRT years.
Let me fix that for you
Does anyone else never use them ever?
Multi-monitor setups make more sense to me, but I don’t even use that anymore after switching to a 65" 4K gaming OLED as my primary monitor. Its like having four 32" 1080p monitors arranged in a grid, except without any bezels. Plenty of screen real estate for anything I need to do.
I took long train rides for a few years, where I’d work with a laptop, so my entire workflow is now single-monitor. I frequently sit down at workplaces at $DAYJOB where I would have two monitors and then I disable one of them, because it’s just genuinely not useful to me.
And if that didn’t terrify you, I also prefer touchpads now. 🙃
And if that didn’t terrify you, I also prefer touchpads now. 🙃
Basically, I do lots of things with keyboard shortcuts, so my hand is hovering over the keyboard by default. Which means, it’s just much quicker for me to reach for the touchpad below the spacebar, and particularly also to later move back to the keyboard without having to find my position anew.
I do still find touchpads less precise, but I often accomplish the clicking of buttons via keyboard shortcuts, and mostly need the mouse pointer for dragging or hovering things, which don’t require a ton of precision.
I think touchpads can be better for anything except video games. But a lot of trackpads are shit, some are too small, others lag, others are made of some material that feels weird to drag your finger onto. Although im not a fan of macbooks for many reasons, they do have great trackpads.
Ah yeah, I don’t do a ton of gaming and mostly keyboard-only. I mean, I do possess a mouse and a game controller, but an advantage of the laptop-only life is that you can throw yourself onto the couch, which I do enjoy.
And I do tend to buy higher-end laptops anyways, so luckily haven’t had to think too much about touchpad quality…
For more than a decade I developed a 3x3 grid with intuitive shortcuts with one monitor, a very visual space distribution, and I do not change it for anything (even when docking my laptop I use only the main monitor, I find it much more mentally efficient, since desktop swaping is faster than moving my head)
Never used them in my life and I’ve been machine computing over 25 years. Always one monitor, one desktop. I close shit I dont need regularly, I click on icons on the tab bar to get to the app I need. The tab bar is wide enough to hold like 30+ of them. Why do I need more than one desktop? Windows go over another, the tab bar shows everything I have open. Why switch? I never got it.
If I have more apps open on at same desktop I can switch to other apps without disturbing the setup. So for example I have a terminal with build output, my app in a browser and inspector open at the same time. I can switch to all the other apps without moving any of it. I just jump back to this workspace and everything is still in the same place. With single desktop if I switch to Firefox I have to bright all 3 windows to the top separately.
With two monitors I can have documentation open in a browser right next to my IDE, both fullscreen. Or have the IDE and my app open. Or a website and it’s logs. Or IDE and Postman. I have multiple firefox windows and terminals open at the same time. This doesn’t work well with single monitor/single desktop because it’s hard to keep track which window is which. If you only use one app at a time (like you only switch between firefox, steam and spotify) one desktop is perfectly fine. When you do bunch of stuff at the same time it gets messy real quick.
Alt+tab (and alt+shift+tab) is all you need imo.
Ctrl+tab for paging through browser tabs is helpful too.
I see it like this: alt+tab only toggles among the two latest things, on a 3x3 grid win+arrows, on a tidy usage of some fixed desktops (one for browser, one for mail, one for current subject…), you have inmediate swaps to multiple relevant programs, not just the latest which also mutates… also it adds some visual mental distribution which I find extremely efficient… never went back and I struggle/frustrate with looking for stuff in a fixed bar… (I had to use quite often both types, so I feel the difference)
If you keep holdind alt while pressing tab multiple times it will cycle over every open window, not only the latest two. You just have no not release alt before you reach the window you want, otherwise it restarts the cycling with the new order of most recently used windows.
alt+tab only toggles among the two latest things
This is simply untrue in KDE. Can’t speak for Windows or other DEs.
Well, they mean with one keypress or at least fairly quickly. Like, I don’t know, maybe you keep in your working memory which windows you had used and then can just hit Alt+Tab+Tab+Tab without looking.
But yeah, as soon as you have to look at the individual windows while switching, it’s gonna take longer and particularly also kind of take you out of your current task.
I just use an alt+tab, uh… skin(?) that is a list of all of my open windows in the middle of the screen. Alt+tab scrolls through them, and as each one is highlighted, it’s brought to the front of the screen.
How far do you even have to be to use a 65" screen? Doesn’t seem practical at all for desktop use.
I’m thinking of trying them, but hard for me to find a usecase. I have two monitors and it’s often useful for me to have different combos of apps open at the sane time, so not sure how to properly use it.
I have a 34" 1440p monitor, which I almost always have tiled in half, and a 1080p monitor next to that. Some more involved workflows will have me branching out to other desktops but I can get a lot done with two monitors. A third would be nice but I’ll need a new desk for that.
I use both
Quad monitors + GNOME workspaces are awesome
I have 3 screens:
- Main screen for whatever i’m doing incl Browser
- Gaming screen wiith Steam and Heroic Launcher
- Comms - Signal, emaiil, discord, everything KDE Connect
- random shit not fitting anywere
- Piracy town: qbittorent, jdownloader, Browser with MANY sources
The second one has many many status widgets, Dolphin, fSearch and a Firefox window that’s my media player, always in the background without any title bars or borders running the deezer webpage as WPA
The third one is connected with a 10m HDMI cable and is not running often, is just used to watch movies :-)
I have mine as
- Fronted
- Backend
- Database
- Browser
- Music
- Project management
- Messaging/Email
All bound to Meta+h/j/k/l/y/u/i and have a bash function to run and configured to go to the right places. KDE is good
What’s the bash function doing? Moving windows to the right desktops when they’re open? Do you have them open on system startup?
Moving windows to the right desktops when they’re open?
You can do that with Window Rules in KDE.
Nah, I don’t like running stuff on startup because I use the laptop for personal stuff also. Not going to open slack/email when I’m off. I don’t move them manually, I use window rules for them to open in a specific activity.
custart() { nohup slack --enable-features=WebRTCPipeWireCapturer & echo "Slack started" nohup spotify & echo "Spotify started" nohup datagrip & echo "Datagrip started" nohup birdtray & echo "Thunderbird started" nohup surfshark & echo "Surfshark started" nohup flatpak run --branch=stable --arch=x86_64 --command=teams-for-linux --file-forwarding com.github.IsmaelMartinez.teams_for_linux @@u %U @@ & echo "MS Teams started" }
Desktop 7 needs to pull themselves by the bootstraps and get a job. Useless.
I have attention dilly dally, so virtual desktops are a huge help to stay on one task at a time.
Is it just me who has the multiple shame workspaces of totally not abandoned personal projects?
Yeah, every so often, I’ll accidentally switch over and think to myself that I should do something on that.
But I’ve kind of gotten messy with them and they’re more just wallpaper colors and rough topics now, which makes it easier to silently start re-using workspaces for new, exciting projects.
I never got into these at all. My coworker thought it was crazy that I never did. I just get a bigger monitor to fit all my stuff, lol. Right now, it’s a 49" ultrawide and have no issues.
I don’t even remember them. And KDE also has this activity whatever thingy that I don’t know what the hell it does.
