Workspace poll results

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

Hi, many of you were curious to know some of the results of the
workspaces poll, so here are some of the results I've been able to
massage out. I received 79 responses to the poll that contained usable
information, and 6 responses that were either too vague or did not
concern themselves with their actual current layout.

Please note that for # of workspaces I used the number respondents
actually had in use (what I was mostly interested in), not the number
present in their system configuration.

# workspaces |  % respondents 
------------------------------
          1  | 14
          2  |  4
          3  | 24
          4  | 38
          5  |  6            
          6  |  5
          7  |  1
          8  |  4
          9  |  1
         10  |  1
         11  |  1

I was also interested in determining how workspaces were being used. I
noticed two major categories of use: project-based and
application-based. Project based users placed a number of disimilar
applications in a workspace, whereas application based users would
frequently put multiple applications of the same sort together even if
they were related to fairly different topics. These categories were not
mutually exclusive, since many people using project sorting also had a
"web browser" workspace and an e-mail workspace. I had no precise
sorting criteria, but the general breakdown was:

    18 people reported information suggesting (directly or otherwise)
some form of project based sorting
    65 people reported information suggesting application based sorting
    
I was also interested in what *sort* of workspaces were being created.
For each category type, I incremented the category if the person had one
or more of that type (so, e.g., having 4 web browsing workspaces only
incremented the web browsing category by one). I did this because I
wanted to figure out which sort of workspaces were the most dominantly
used to figure out if there was a more direct way to accomodate the
activity. Many workspaces were also observed with some odd mix of
applications. I did not count these, though I probably should have. I
did not count 2 or fewer terminals on any workspace as excluding it from
that category because terminals seemed sprinkled randomly throughout all
workspaces. Remember that these distributions are for exclusive
workspace types. Many applications (such as Nautilus, Music, and Office
apps) were frequently found in conjunction with a number of other random
apps and hence did not get counted here.

The way to read these results is: "_X_ percent of respondents had a
workspace devoted to _Activity|Application_".

Workspace type        | % respondents
--------------------------------------
Web browsers          : 71
Mail                  : 57
Development[1]        : 26
Music                 : 20
IRC                   : 18
Remote terminals      : 14
Editor (mostly emacs) : 13
Office                : 13
File manager[2]       : 11
2+ of Mail/IRC/IM     :  9
Clutter apps[3]       :  7
IM                    :  7
Root terminals        :  6
Graphics[4]           :  6
Games                 :  4

[1] Terminals specified for development activities (most were that
weren't remote or root), or IDEs, or Devhelp (appeared really often!)
[2] Mostly Nautilus
[3] Some users reported having a workspace they used for "applications
that open lots of windows", and almost invariably went on to report
"such as glade and gimp". I called these "clutter apps".
[4] Mostly gimp

Sticky applications:
Two kinds of application were sticky in significant percentages, IM
clients and XMMS. 9% of people had a sticky XMMS. 8% had a stick IM
cilent.

-Seth