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Comment by alex_duf | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand, on Gnome when you maximize a window (drag to top) you can still see the time.

Now if you're talking about complete fullscreen, like when watching a video, I' don't understand the use case. Either you want fullscreen or you don't?

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Baffled me too but I get it now, they want fullscreen on the first monitor and a clock on the second.

I agree GP was talking about the multi monitor scenario, but I also run into trouble with just one monitor. If I'm playing a full screen game and want to know what time it is, there's no way to focus the task bar without closing the game entirely. On Windows, hitting the start button while in a fullscreen app will give focus to the taskbar so you can glance at the time and immediately return to the game.

Yeah, I lost so many Warcraft III games on Battle.net, when I accidentally pressed that pesky button, while having a pretty decent computer with 256 MB RAM. I ended up facing a separate keyboard without the key (and some others too).

Thankfully, these days when I want to play a bit (with a computer, sigh) on my Sway setup, yeah, it doesn’t react to that button.

Saying all that, yeah, I never considered that — having your game being lost to buggy and slow Windows — a feature. I wouldn’t want that even today, having 125 times more RAM than 20 years ago.

This is now solved because games don’t default to exclusive fullscreen anymore, so the windows compositor still runs on top of the game, so popping up the start menu is instant without any weird resolution/hdr changes

Ha, "instant". It will appear 30 seconds later, out of context, like a kraken from the depths.

My trinket drawer still contains five assorted Windows keys that I prised out of various keyboards for this reason. Vague plans to make a necklace.

Ah thanks, I was so confused

Just because someone wants a single app to have a full screen (video, game, an IDE, etc), doesn’t mean they aren’t using their other screens/desktops for work.

Even with a single screen I sometimes want a video in full screen, while keeping an app window (email, excel, whatever) in a window in front of it.

right click -> "always on top". That's available by default

Well, that only works for GTK 3 or 4 apps. Thanks to CSDs and GNOME's refusal to implement SSDs, every app that's not either running in XWayland or a GTK3/4 app has its own decorations without the context menu with the always on top option.

There was some way of enabling always on top on non-GTK3/4 apps too, but I don't remember it off the top of my head.

You can use the alt+space shortcut to access the window context menu on any window, even if they are not a gtk/gnome app. At least on my system qt and kde apps still get some kind of ssd decoration that behaves somewhat like the gnome apps, plus access to the window context menu, though I agree things should be better than this and work more universally...

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