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I'm pretty sure most people are glad that long time linux users were not employed to point out any deficiencies in any UI metaphors (like Spaces).

(And I say this as someone who likes Mac OS X almost entirely because of its Unix underpinnings)

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Fair point, I suppose I just want a linux geek to look at the areas of OSX I consider to be deficient. I was thrilled when virtual desktops came to OSX as a core feature, but there are some bugs that seem like show stoppers that I'd think a *nix hacker would have run into. Similarly, it seems like 3rd party dev package management is always a chore... but on that front I'm probably just being anal.

Care to elaborate on the show stopping bugs of Spaces?

I use virtual desktops constantly in Linux, but have abandoned Spaces when on the Mac. I haven't really taken the time to distill what isn't 'right' about Spaces, so I'd be curious to hear what others think are the problems with it.

Sometimes a confirmation dialog will popup in a window, and I'm not sure about what conditions cause this, but it gets stuck "between" spaces so you will catch a glimpse of the dialog while switching spaces, but it vanishes once the desktop-changing animation finishes. This is often a blocking dialog, so the app becomes unusable (from memory it's happened with Safari and Dreamweaver). The solution is to stick the mouse cursor in the middle of the screen, switch to the space the dialog should be on and click madly to make sure the dialog gains focus, then do the switch again but hit space or enter to take whatever the default option is in the dialog.

The second, less severe issue is that it will yank you between desktops 3 or 4 times for unclear reasons. It's sort of as if someone else is controlling the desktop switching and they just want to annoy the crap out of you.

FWIW, I used Desktop Linux/BSD for ~8 years before going to OSX, so maybe I have just been spoiled by a very old (eg, well debugged) virtual desktop implementation in X11.

I think the second issue mostly happens when things execute slowly (e.g. with a HDD bottleneck). So something takes focus, then something else completes and takes focus, etc. (I agree it’s terrible, just explaining what I think is happening!)

Not really a bug, but I mainly found it too slow. In linux you can just scroll over the desktop to switch. And I couldn't see how to drag windows across spaces for easy organization (without going the long way to show all spaces).

If you drag a window to the edge of a space it'll flip after a brief delay.

Well, dragging itself is a chore.

I get that he hates the desktop metaphor, but it still needs to be improved. Little things like the cube metaphor & wobbly windows go a long way.

Why is the cube metaphor better than desktop?

I mean it's a good way of representing a set of 4 desktops.

I'm with you for the most part on package management, but Spaces does some really crazy stuff. I'll be in one space, and suddenly get jerked into another. How can that ever be appropriate?

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