Comment by brnaftr361 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by brnaftr361 | Hacker News Reader

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I find it remarkable that there really doesn't seem like a lot of momentum to innovate the desktop. I'm dead sick of Windows and Mint is just a carbon copy.

I want several, hard, discrete desktops. I want one that I can toss a bunch of graphics files onto that has something kin to "Fences" so I don't have to navigate the file explorer. And with the flick of a button I can move to a different desktop that I've set up for work, one for play and etc... I think Ubuntu used to have something similar, though I wouldn't be surprised if it actually behaves much like Windows and is just a window manager.

I do a lot on the desktop to specifically avoid the file manager because file managers seem to be intrinsically unnavigable. And then there's inconsistencies between applications which is enough to press me ever closer to an aneurysm. Going between the Win10 file explorer and one from Win95 a la ImageJ is awful.

Shit, with a system like that I reckon you could almost get away without a file explorer.

windows 11 does have the option of discrete desktops. not sure if that is what you are referring to.

I'd say it has the opposite, the desktop itself is shared among several virtual environments. However, I believe W8 did have it.

You know how you swipe between pages on a phone desktop? Organize all the logically coherent things together for productivity and badda bing badda boom.

And Fences does that, mostly. It has "pages" and the "Fences" themselves. Implementation is... Passable. And unfortunately Stardock's reputation isn't stellar.

It'd be nice to see a native system for Windows or Linux that replicates it.

I'm on Windows 11, and when I click the "Task View" button which is usually right next to the windows button on the task bar, I get a layout of all my open windows on my current desktop. But there is a ribbon across the bottom of the screen that shows "Desktop 1" and "Desktop 2" and another with "Add Desktop".

I can have a dozen windows spread out all across my 3 monitors on desktop 1 and a different windows placed on Desktop 2. when I switch to desktop 2, it switches the whole view to the other windows.

And now, as I write this and test it out, I realize that you must be talking about the icons on the desktop rather than the open programs? That would make sense, because those icons do stay the same no matter which desktop.

I guess I just never thought about that because I almost never use desktop icons anymore. I just hit the windows key on the keyboard and start typing to find what I want. I actually rarely even see my actual desktop, because that would require me to close everything or minimize everything to see the icons and that is just an extra step.

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