There maybe some people who want this but they are not the marority. A task and an application are unrelated things. A task most likely spans one/several browser tabs + a couple of documents in different apps.

So use virtual desktops for that? KDE also has those.

KDE has both virtual desktops and activities:

https://docs.kde.org/trunk5/en/kde-workspace/plasma-desktop/...

I haven't got into the habit of using them but the original issue we're talking about is arbitrary grouping that does not seem to help how people work in reality.

This is actually the first time I hear a user making this argument. Aaron J. Seigo would love you, as he added Activities in kde 4 for this exact use case.

(unless, of course, you are aseigo in disguise)

I'm not actually using KDE atm and not familiar with activities, what are the usecases for activities and how do they compare to virtual desktops?

> Well maybe it's what everyone else wants.

Could you give an argument for why someone would want it?

Because it takes up less real estate and I know what app I’m looking for. I don’t have separate windows for all my Firefox tabs even though you could consider them to belong to 5 or 6 different categories.

Why not let the application decide, like with browser tabs?

I absolutely hate it that the default for Gnome is to group all windows of the same application together under the same icon. When I have multiple terminals open, then they are in no way related. I want a specific one. Like writing code in an editor and a terminal for running the application or compiling, and then another one for some shell access.

> Why not let the application decide, like with browser tabs?

That means you need to wait for each application to add support for it whereas here it is the window manager.

What you want it seems is to group the windows by workflow. You can do what. Use a different desktop per workflow. I have 1 main 2 reference 3 utilities Then set your task bar to only show windows from the current desktop.

Gnome is also incredibly slow to allow one to select a particular window when Alt-Tabbing. It is a one second delay every time you want to change window.

A nice solution is to simply put each icon/task of the same application side by side, so for instance you get 3 firefox icons in a row in the taskbar/dock, that's what I do, there's enough space anyway. That way you can quickly tell what's open and switch to them.

For me mentally, it makes more sense that all windows of the same application are grouped. In your example, when I want to focus the PDF file, I first look for the icon of my PDF viewer and I don't want there to be three icons; I want just one icon and if I (right)click it get a list in which I see the window titles.

To save screen space, and have all windows of same kind (e.g. PDF views) in a single unit.

> Well maybe it's what everyone else wants.

It's not what I want either, and it's not what most other Linux users I know want either.

It's copying the behavior of MacOS, plain and simple, and I disagree with them doing that. I don't use MacOS because I don't like MacOS, and the last thing I want is MacOS-like Linux.

> It's copying the behavior of MacOS, plain and simple

And of Windows 7-8-10 (and of Unity). And the opposite is just copying the behavior of Windows 95-2000 (XP would already group taskbar buttons by default although it still couldn't "pin" them and required separate launcher buttons).

And, by the way, MacOS doesn't group all the windows by default, some get a separate icon when launched (at least they did some years ago, I don't know about the recent versions).

> I don't use MacOS because I don't like MacOS, and the last thing I want is MacOS-like Linux.

Fortunately, there are many different WMs/DEs on Linux and you don't have to use KDE (or its default set-up) either. You can either tweak it, or choose a different WM/DE or write your own (I would totally do so if I had more spare time).

> I don't use MacOS because I don't like MacOS, and the last thing I want is MacOS-like Linux.

Same here, but grouping applications when the taskbar is full isn't too unreasonable, is it? It is not even necessarily copied from Mac, it might have been Windows who introduced or at least made it mainstream I think (It wouldn't surprise me at all if it existed on some Linux Desktop environment as an option before that.)

The taskbar is never that full for me. I usually use more virtual workspaces when there is too much stuff in one workspace.

Good for you. Then you can set the taskbar to not group applications :-)

It's a setting you can change.