It drives me nuts when I switch applications with
alt+tab and get jumped to another space.
I've never really liked Gnome much, you might want to try some of the other DEs out there, especially since Gnome is pushing a whole new interface in a few months so you'll have to learn new stuff anyway.
Now there's single-app mode, which I take as a tacit acknowledgement that real maximization instead of "zoom" was a good idea after all. How long did that take, again?
I really really want to like OS X. It does so many things right (focus-stealing, DnD, and copy-paste among them!) It's just so painful to use after having a real WM.
[edit] For reference, I use Openbox; the listed features (except for tiling/tabbing) are what I use everyday. I expect the awesome/ratpoison crowd has slightly different but no less valid criticisms.
The maximising the Window thing is a tacit acknowledgement that you're not actually using the full potential of your desktop as a multi-application environment. :-P
If you want to bash a Windowing system that truly deserves it, bash the one from Windows! OS X isn't perfect, but Windows is really really bad. Except for Windows 7, which made big improvements (aka copying OS X) and is now merely really bad.
I'll give you that Linux has a few better WMs than OS X. (I'm particularly fond of Openbox myself, and was always excited about the elusive 'Enlightenment e17'.)
However, I cannot accept any claim that X is better than Quartz.
His comment is fair considering the parent comment was confusing about why it took so long to get spaces (an aspect of window management) because of elements of the windowing system.
Regardless, his use of Window Manager and System are fine within context.
Mission Control is a powerful and handy new feature that
provides you with a comprehensive view of what’s running
on your Mac. It gives you a bird’s-eye view of everything
— including Exposé, >>> Spaces <<<, Dashboard, and full-screen apps.
There you can see your open windows grouped by app, thumbnails
of your full-screen apps, Dashboard, and >>> even other Spaces <<<,
arranged in a unified view.
Then again, the screenshot provided doesn't seem to show any hint of spaces.
[Edit: Perhaps the spaces appear alongside the full screen apps?]
I think you see no hint of Spaces because it will probably continue to be off by default.
You know when Microsoft did this sort of thing in the browser wars, a lot of people got up in arms about it.
http://loewald.com/blog/?p=3440 (careful watching of the demo revealed that pretty much nothing showed worked terribly well)
I think it might be interesting to integrate ideas in spaces, expose, etc. by dynamically rescaling the UI when the user does stuff like resize or move a window. (After all, when you're messing with a window's dimensions you're generally not too concerned with every pixel in a given window.)
In other words -- why does Expose need to be an explicit mode? When I resize or drag and drop -- rescale the UI dynamically to deal with the relationships between windows and apps. And this becomes even easier if some or most windows are full screen by default.
I find that the focus model tends to break down in Spaces for any multi-window application like Finder, Chrome, Emacs and Terminal. If every window of an application is going to jump to the top then that just adds extra work to switching desktops.
That being said, I do like the Application->Window switching model on it's own and wouldn't trade this for Virtual Desktops.
Some people might think that Spaces is essential but Apple seems to disagree with them. (I’m not saying that Apple is right.)
I, too, thought that most people wouldn't really care much for spaces, however I have noticed several of my non-technical friends using and began wondering. The conclusion that I came to is that, if you replace my IDE with something like MS Word and my text editor with something else, perhaps Photoshop or Illustrator, you'd get roughly the same workflow that I have, just without the code.
Now, I'm not saying that Spaces is essential, but I this is one case where something we think is nerdy, is actually pretty main stream.
Since were on the topic of application visibility and switching. I'm wondering if there is a better way than spaces. It's obvious that full-screen mode with easy switching isn't it. I find that context switch to complicated though I'm not quite sure why - way back when I was on windows, that was the way I did things. Perhaps expose is underused?
I would be most unhappy if Spaces went away, but I wouldn't be too surprised either.
Spaces wasn’t mentioned in the demo at all and it would be very inelegant to just tack it on top of the concept Apple has for the desktop. I will be surprised if it is still there when Lion arrives.
Multitouch gestures to switch between spaces (instead of fullscreen apps as was demoed in the sneak peak) would be pretty cool but I’m not holding my breath.
Apple does like to drop nerdy features few people use from time to time. The only thing that gives me pause is that they also seem quite happy to keep at least some of them around. The screen corners would be one example. (Then again, screen corners don’t change the whole desktop around.)