A while ago I installed KDE 4.6 on one of my machines, just to see what the bulky extreme of desktops looked like these days. Mostly, it was obscenely bulky (KDE alone is, seriously, larger than the sum of the software I have on my workstation on campus) and cluttered (what is the deal with that fucking cashew). However, there are a lot of improvements over the last time I fiddled with KDE, and a few features I really, really like.
Some of the little nice things: The control panels are all integrated and aware of each other. The GUI wrappers around randr are genuinely nice (display attachment behavior as good as Windows 7’s – which is frankly the best I’ve ever seen), and the fact that it customizes nicely to CDE-style right-click-the-desktop menus (sans this bug when I first tried) is promising.
The most important (The nomenclature alone for this behavior is nonstandard) is “Desktop Gluing” – Permanently fixing particular windows (or applications, or whatever) to particular virtual desktops. In KDE, a huge array of window behaviors can be set from “Advanced Window Settings” or “Advanced Application Settings” panels obtained by right-clicking the title bar of a window. It’s a good design – unobtrusive until you go looking for it, and obvious once you do. I always keep my “Communication and Identity” stuff (Email, Chat clients, a browser with whatever social things I feel like tending to, etc.) on my second workspace, and this makes it much easier to respond to message alerts without pulling those windows to other workspaces.
Any EWMH compliant environment SHOULD be able to do this, (and apparently E17 has behavior similar to KDE, but E17 has improved from “Broken” to “Useless” over the last few times I’ve played with it, so that isn’t terribly helpful). I can’t find a way to replicate this behavior with XFCE. The native settings don’t have anything, and Devil’s Pie and wmctrl can both cause windows to OPEN on a specified desktop, but they are both extra, somewhat fussy, programs that need to run in the background, and neither can force a window to STAY on a particular desktop.
When looking into the feature, I did make the excellent discovery that XFCE has had a setting for the last several releases that takes care of one of the problems window gluing solves. Based on this Bug Report, one can switch the obnoxious “Pull window to active workspace when activated” behavior to either move focus to the workspace the window is on (My desired behavior), or just alert in the task bar.
Always nice to find little ways to improve the workflow, and see what the other desktop environments are doing, especially with so much of the UI “Innovation” of late being disappointing (see iOS, and Unity).
