Re: Metacity Proposal: Grouping Windows

[Ryan McDougall <ryan mcdougall telusplanet net>]

On Wed, 2004-03-03 at 12:11 +0000, Telsa Gwynne wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 02, 2004 at 11:40:19PM -0700 or thereabouts, Ryan McDougall wrote:
> > Proposal to Add Grouping to Metacity, and some Rationale
> [...]
> > A random, non-scientific sample of 20 junior Computer Science students
> > at a major university running Ximian GNOME 1.4 on Sun workstations,
> > shows that only 3 users made use of more than one desktop. All were
> > running multiple tasks/windows (usually emacs, terminal, mozilla). When
> > 5 students were asked why they weren't using the extra desktops, three
> > didn't know what that they existed, and two didn't consider it worth the
> > effort to maintain multiple desktops. This is purely anecdotal and
> > *unscientific*, but hopefully illustrative.
> 
> Before using this as a basis, you might be interested in a 
> similar random non-scientific poll which Seth conducted a 
> year or two ago. The results of his were a bit different.
> 
> The entire thing is worth a read so I am not going to attempt
> to summarise it:
> 
> http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2002-August/msg00199.html
> 
> [rest snipped]
> 
> Telsa
> 

Im not really using my "study" as a foundation, since its not strong
enough to support anything. 

It was nice reading the link, but I think the sample appears to be
experienced Unix users. Mine is junior CPSC students, so I don't
consider the results to be mutually exclusive: What that survey shows is
that people *like* to organize their windows into categories that are
meaningful to them. What I propose isn't to remove the ability to
organize, but take that ability to the next level by shifting the
paradigm slightly. Workspaces can categorize, but they are passive and
can't be manipulated as spatial objects. All Im trying to do wrt virtual
desktops is add transformations to the groupings we already have.

Cheers,
Ryan