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Comment by doubleunplussed | Hacker News Reader

In GNOME you can four-finger swipe to switch workspaces. Maximising won't automatically put the app on a workspace, but you can use a keyboard shortcut to shift the current window to the next workspace until you get to a blank workspace, then maximise it. Or you can drag and drop the window to a new workspace in the overview.

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Swiping feels awful in Linux though. Linux still doesn't have proper animation mapping to swiping, so moving workspaces happens after the swipe gesture, not during. Scrolling in Linux using a trackpad feels terrible too. I almost switched away from Linux just because scrolling in Firefox felt so bad.

You’re painting this as a fault with Linux, but it’s almost certainly the fault of a desktop environment. Were you using GNOME? You can adjust the way that trackpad scrolling works in Firefox and in GNOME Tweak Tool, IIRC.

Hey you might be right that has changed recently - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1564238

I'll have to dig into it more

The fact you have to configure anything for scrolling to work smoothly on a web browser paints linux in a bad light itself. The main reason i do not watch to switch to linux [apart from missing adobe catlogue and sketch] is stuff like the track pad, being able to navigate around using various gestures, having little things like invisible scroll bars etc. Subtle animations and visual queues really make the experience smooth. Its not even about eye candy, just seemlessness so your mind doesnt notice the workflow - which is what you want. The latest ubuntu doesnt even let you drag drop on the desktop? i really want linux but it still seems miles away from sleekness of osx

In gnome under wayland the swiping tracks, i think. Its new - might not be in the version in ubuntu yet. Also, wayland has its issues so im not using it yet.

Isn't a F11 supported as a shortcut in most of applications to switch to full-screen mode? I remember it was supported over vast majority GUI applications I used, when I was complaining on small screen, but now personally, I don't understand why somebody would need it make windows be maximized-to-workspace as in macOS. There isn't such huge dock, and application menus were redesigned to be in-app-hamburger-menus and finally displays manufactures now provide monitors with higher resolution than few years ago. If you really notice lack of focus / working space, you shouldn't look for typical GNOME/KDE DEs but for a WM (windows managers) like Sway/i3 or AwesomeWM, which helped me to be more productive, when I dab in multiple applications at once.

F11 works in almost all apps, but it is dependent on the app and not the window manager, so it's not completely universal. All gtk and qt apps will be fine, but I had to configure my terminal (alacritty) to support it.

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