cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/34255100

Thought I’d create a distinct thread from the previous one asking about daily use, because I really do want to hear more on people’s pain points. Great to know people are generally sounding pretty positive in those posts who recently switched, but want to know your difficulties as well! This way old and new users can share their thoughts, hopefully to inspire a respectful discussion.

  • gwl [he/him]@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    2·
    12 hours ago

    Honestly, the only feature, and it’s not even part of baseline Windows (it’s from Windows Powertoys), that I’m missing is Workspaces, I had made that a main part of my workflow daily.

    The feature creates Shortcut Buttons that when pressed does two steps, in sequence;

    1. opens specific numbers of specific windows
    2. automatically tiles them into a specific layout

    Only had 2 of them;

    • gaming
      • opened Steam + Browser + Spotify + Discord
      • Steam on the left screen, Browser and Discord on the right screen, Spotify minimised
    • TTRPGs
      • opened two browser windows and discord
      • one browser window full screen on left, the other sharing half the screen with discord on the right
    • Buddahriffic@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      10 hours ago

      Seems like this is possible, but the method (and maybe ability) depends on your window manager.

      If you’re using x11, you can interact with the window manager via the command line (so could set up the whole thing in a script). An example command line tool: xdotool (search for “interacting with x11 via command line” for more info).

      If you’re on Wayland, one of the design principles was to avoid programmatically interacting with window size or position; the user will set up their composer to behave as they want, not how the programmer of that program wants, and especially not how programmers of other arbitrary programs want (it was a security issue at the extremes, or could be annoying for more common cases). But you, the user, do have control, though it depends on your DE and what Wayland compositor it is using. On fedora KDE, you can use KWin scripts (which supports several languages).

      There’s also some other window managers that can offer better control, and perhaps it’s enough for the window manager to simply remember the position of windows when they are closed (which I think Wayland does or can be configured to do easier than writing a script, then you just need a launch script for the programs in your shortcuts).