i'm confused by GNOME's behavior of automatically deleting desktop workspaces when they're empty, it breaks my assumption that certain programs are on a certain workspace number

does anyone know a way to turn this off ?

@orionwl in the Gnome Tweak Tool, you can select to have static workspaces, which sounds like what you might want.

@cbaines thank you, that worked !

hadn't expected it to be so easy 😀

@orionwl @cbaines ...there goes my chance to recommend some nerdy tiling window manager...

@pete @cbaines heh—i'm no stranger to those 🙂

i used awesomewm on my previous laptop
the thing is, being able to script the WM in lua gives flexibility, but it's also yet another program to fix bugs in, to collect snippets for, to have to keep up to date with API changes

GNOME (with tweaks) works ok enough for me for now

@orionwl @cbaines Heh, I hate having to fiddle with windows sizes; awesomevm all the way. Works fine with qubes too: https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/awesome/

@pete @cbaines
i agree, i only use two window layouts in practice: full screen, and two windows side by side
(this is trivial enough to be easy with GNOME key shortcuts as well 😀 )

another thing that made me switch is that awesomewm doesn't work with wayland

@orionwl @cbaines heh, that's a good point! I use more than that, because I often have logs running, and I really like being able to flip which window has focus. But it should be doable to add the key functionality of tiling window managers to gnome with sufficiently clever shortcuts...

Heck, how hard could it be to give gnome workspaces a preferred window layout option? AwesomeWM already does that basically.

@pete @orionwl @cbaines It's possible to give Gnome tiling functionality with https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/28/gtile/

Not sure about the fixed layout thing, it might also do that well enough for your needs.

@kekcoin @pete @orionwl @cbaines Is KDE still a thing? I don't think it recovered from KDE4.

@verretor @kekcoin @pete @cbaines
yes KDE is still a thing (haven't used it for >10 years though so no idea what it's like now)

@orionwl @kekcoin @pete @cbaines https://twitter.com/verretor/status/925276173973811200

@verretor KDE Plasma is really solid and one of the lightest desktop environments now. I'm on that or dwm depending on the box.
@orionwl @kekcoin @pete @cbaines

@livestradamus @orionwl @kekcoin @pete @cbaines That's what people told me in 2017 and it sucked.

@verretor tbf that's 3 yrs ago. Both gnome 3 and KDE Plasma 5 weren't as stable as today. You might be surprised.
@orionwl @kekcoin @pete @cbaines

@livestradamus @orionwl @kekcoin @pete @cbaines That's what people tell me every time.

@verretor @livestradamus @orionwl @kekcoin @pete @cbaines take the minimalist tiling window manager pill (like i3wm)

@crunklord420 @verretor @cbaines @kekcoin @livestradamus @orionwl @pete you mean dwm?

@knarkzel @kekcoin @livestradamus @crunklord420 @pete @cbaines @orionwl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I3_(window_manager)