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Comment by _b8r0 | Hacker News Reader

As someone who uses multiple tagged desktops in Awesome on Arch Linux, but doesn't even use spaces on Mac, can anyone tell me why I should, and is it better or worse than Awesome's multiple desktops?

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I'll just add my support for the sibling comments that Spaces is really awkward in comparison to workspaces/tags/whatever on all the Linux DEs I've used, including minimalist stuff like Openbox. In OS X, Spaces is just a tacked-on deal that doesn't work well with the rest of the experience, and most people don't know it exists until they accidentally trigger it with a corner or key combo. If you value multiple desktops, you'll be much better off using a Linux DE.

I run Arch Linux on my MacBook Pro, for instance. This has made at least two Mac fanboys seriously hate me.

upvote for running linux :)

I'd like to think that having Mac fanboys hate you is a peripheral perk that comes with running Linux on it.

To be fair, I dislike fanboys of all shapes, colours and flavours.

I started using OSX after using XMonad for the better part of a year, and it doesn't even come close. Like vault_ stated, its simply to clunky. It takes almost a second to switch between workspaces, with a shiny and pointless animation. The shortcuts are hard to get right too, I still don't have a good one to send windows between workspaces (which I used to use extensively for keeping things organized and staying sane.)

I assume XMonad is a similar experience to Awesome--I never tried to understand Awesome too much. Spaces cannot compare.

Xmonad is nice, but Awesome's tags beat it IMO. You don't really have multiple desktops, you have multiple tags. Each window can have multiple tags and there can be multiple tags visible on the screen at any moment. So what you end up seeing is a union between all the windows with any of the tags that are set to be visible.

Awesome is both really minimal and really extensible. By default you don't have anything, and you build it up to how you like it with lua and a couple of libraries that expose bindings to things like desktops and tags.

My comment above repeated here just for you. Try:

defaults write com.apple.dock workspaces-swoosh-animation-off -bool YES

restart finder. Enable number key navigation.

You're right, it's hard to move windows between. But, you can set defaults so that certain apps open in certain spaces. For me, this has been good enough.

Awesome, thank you. Even though I don't necessarily like Spaces, I still use them extensively. No animation makes it better, I have not used application assignments yet (but probably will soon.)

Well, nothing really compares to Awesome's tagging system (and I say that after only managing to survive a few days in Awesome, I need a bit more structure by default).

I'm not really sure why, but Spaces just feels inferior to basically every multiple desktop implementation I've used on Linux. There's just not enough of a UI for it, and it's clunky to use. On Linux using multiple desktops is smooth and natural. On OS X, it just feels weird.

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