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by ssp 5818 days ago
It's not obvious that they are a good idea in general. One pretty bad issue is that if you don't know about work spaces, then hitting Ctrl-Arrow will have the effect that everything vanishes with no obvious way to get it back.

It's also not clear to me that they actually make people more productive even if they are aware of them and understand them. Of course many nerds feel they are being more productive, but that only indicates that if you wish to sell to nerds, you should include them at least as an option.
2 comments
cookiecaper 5818 days ago
I know it's anecdotal, but workspaces make me _much_ more productive. I use awesomewm and it's very fast to be able to keep everything up and active and just switch over to a screen dedicated to web, email, IM, or the rest of my screens which usually have different clients' projects up for easy and quick access, and makes switching tasks much easier. It doesn't clutter anything to have all this up at once; no task bar clutter, no window clutter.

If someone knows how to use workspaces and has cause for more than one or two windows over the course of their computer usage, I don't see how they could _not_ make someone more productive.

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SwellJoe 5816 days ago
I'm certain I'm more productive when I'm running Linux, after having spent enough time in Mac OS X and Windows to have confidence in that result (my 3G modem doesn't work in Linux, and until I got a router for it, I had to boot into Windows or Mac OS X to work online, so I spent a couple of months on the other side). But, workspaces are definitely not the only factor. The biggest is actually having a really good shell (bash with the bash_completion package) that is comfortably integrated into the OS and has tabs. I'm horribly unproductive in the Windows shell, and the Mac OS X shell is just weird, though better than Windows. I'm not even sure why the Mac OS X terminal is so uncomfortable to me...it's bash, but it feels really clunky compared to the Gnome Terminal.

Anyway, workspaces are definitely something I really, really, miss when I use Windows. I regularly have a couple dozen windows open, often several of the same app but in use for different tasks, and it's kind of a nightmare to keep up with what's where.

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