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Comment by emeraldd | Hacker News Reader

I've been a Gentoo user now for a good 7~8 years and every time I've tried playing with Windows again the one thing that I immediately notice and immediately get annoyed about is the lack of 'work spaces' ( http://www.whylinuxisbetter.net/items/virtual_desktops/index... ). I know there are implementations of this idea for Windows (Heck I even built one when I was learn shudder VB6 back in the day) but not a one I've seen is worth the effort of finding it.

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I'm primarily a Windows user, though I dip into Linux pretty often. The first thing I do in any new install is to disable all but one or maybe two workspaces. Multiple workspaces just strikes me as a hack to get around poor panel design, or to facilitate running a modern PC on an ancient monitor.

If I leave >1 active I'm prone to losing windows on alternate workspaces; if I'd upped the number to 12 like the person who wrote that page, I couldn't even fill them all. You can see even he had trouble making them look "used" so he could take a screenshot. I've been using this PC daily for the 24 or so weeks it's been up, and I've only got 13 windows open.

I usually run eight desktops on my machine. Most of the time, half of them sit empty until I need to switch tasks. In my previous day job, I'd keep email up on one, a development set for my local machine (editor, logs, browser, etc.), windows for references on another. I leave a full set of window up, positioned exactly the way I want them, and move to a clean desktop to deal with incidental, "could you take a look at X" tasks.

Being able to spread out what I'm working on without minimizing or overlapping windows really helps segregate what's going on.

I do similar things with tab groups/stacks in Firefox and Opera (mainly to keep fewer than 20 tabs visible at once). Guess it just doesn't feel "right" to me to run my whole system that way.

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