I just love that on the Linux desktop this kind of innovation is possible. They are paving the way for an entirely new desktop experience and I’m so excited to see where this goes!

Seems very interesting

Hmm, the Mosaic concept is quite interesting, but I feel like, personally, I wouldn’t want to use it over traditional tiling.

For example, my workflow does involve moving windows to a new workspace to have them maximized, but I do that very deliberately. I want control over which workspaces are next to each other, so I can quickly switch between related applications.

But I am usually on a smaller screen, so:

• I’m not really affected by the overly large windows, they’re trying to resolve,
• I need lots of workspaces and that predictable navigation between them to fit all the windows, and
• I would encounter the screen-full edge cases with Mosaic layouting quite regularly.

Then again, they do have the idea here that if the screen is full, it will basically switch to traditional tiling. If on small screens, the screen is pretty much always full, and if the traditional tiling works well, then all my objections would be void. 🙃

Stuff like this is why I love Linux. Without ideas like this we would be using the same old boring windows desktop for the rest of our lives. I’m all for GNOME experimenting with new ways to manage windows.

The biggest reason for me being excited about System76’s new DE is that they’ll implement 1st class tiling support. Tiling being only possible through extensions on Gnome comes with limitations/bugs I don’t experience on tiling compositors like sway and hyprland.

That’s why I’m really happy to see work going into native tiling on Gnome and I’ll definitely give it a go once some working prototype is available.