Comment by linkdd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by linkdd | Hacker News Reader

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> It's not uncommon with tiling WMs that have good multi-monitor support, but you really can't find it in traditional WMs

That's because this feature is not a Freedesktop standard. The X11 root window have a property _NET_NUMBER_OF_DESKTOPS and a few more[0] to help implement this behavior.

Most tiling WMs choose to ignore this standard in favor of this great feature. But the WMs of Gnome, Xfce, KDE, etc... will probably never implement it just in case some apps don't support it (like some games that needs to be floating windows in tiling WMs).

  [0] - https://specifications.freedesktop.org/wm-spec/1.3/ar01s03.html

Freedesktop isn't specifying standards, it just puts out some specs to help interoperability where that is desired but not all specs are expected to be followed and really anyone can propose new specs. It is even in their site:

https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/

> freedesktop.org produces specifications for interoperability, but we are not an official standards body. There is no requirement for projects to implement all of these specifications, nor certification.

Freedesktop doesn't have any sort of authority, while it does provide some useful specs (e.g. the .desktop files are in general useful), not everything they do is like that.

The reason that this isn't found in floating WMs is simply that the developers of those WMs didn't found it useful to implement it, not because of Freedesktop (which BTW could update EWMH to include such a thing, it isn't like it has to be written in stone).

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