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Actually it is you who brings another topic to the table. Judging from your other posts where you mention Qt [1] it looks like you are trying to start a flame war. Again.

[1] Yeah it is _Qt_ not QT. QT could be taken as QuickTime.

Troll detected.

I dare you to attempt to defend GNOME's UI choices on their merits. I will shred your arguments in to fine spaghetti and then feed it to you, one revolting bite at a time, while I enumerate GNOME's failings memorably by punctuating each criticism with an evaluation of your intelligence calculated to be unflattering to you and amusing to the audience.

+1. If only tabs were a standard feature of windows managers and graphics toolkits so that applications with multiple windows can be made to use a tabbed or docked layout easily...

You know, something like the tabbed windows of Safari 4 betas and recent releases of KDE, but in a much more polished way.

Fluxbox, KDE and Awesome (to some hacky extent) does that that ability

+1 for tabs, but not all applications support tabs.

Another problem might be if you have multiple activities using the same application (for example let's say that in my browser I have 5 tabs for one project and 5 for another). You can solve this using Tab Groups in Firefox 4 or Linux's virtual desktops (not the half-assed implementation Apple calls Spaces).

Also tabs should be provided by the OS in an unified way, not by every app in its own unique way.

Until all this is supported ... I think it's a bit premature to do away with multiple windows.

I totally agree!

Tabs are not a replacement for proper window management.

How do you show the content of two tabs side-by-side (or one above the other) in the same app? Very easy to do with two windows.

How do you create a 2x2 square of four tabs? Very easy to do with 4 windows.

Once you start adding those features to a tabbed interface, you are back to an MDI interface, and lose all the benefits of tabs.

A proper task manager, with proper window management (Windows 7 dwm is crap in this department), gives you the best of all worlds: windows, tabs, and tasks.

Silly user! No one needs to work with two windows from the same application! Or, if you need that you can click extra times! It's not as if convenience for common use cases like this is as important as following an artist's mockup that looks pretty.

Usage scenarios with 2 windows of the same app, off the top of my head:
* I'm using a web browser and want to open another window in anonymous mode (I do quite often to log in as another user on websites I create - this way I don't kill the original session).
* chat windows in IM programs (Pidgin) are separate from the main window (the one with a buddy list).
* open some app as root (a text editor would be a common example)
* GIMP's interface is multi-windowed.

I'm using Docky on the left on "older" Gnome (2.32), placed on the left (the same as on the video in TFA). There's a option (AFAIR not a default) to have an indicator next to dock icons that tells that there are multiple windows open. Right click brings a contextual menu that lets me choose a window to be focused. It's not very handy (I'd like a left click on an icon to toggle focused windows).

It seems a number of people are commenting solely based on their misunderstanding of some text rather than any actual user experience. GNOME Shell allows users to run multiple times the same app. It is just not the default action when you click on a icon. Right click provides a option "New Window" which does the task just fine.

Also Maximize and Minimize are still options and can be enabled via dconf. Just not the default.

Is there a window list in a taskbar or something similar?

There is a Dash which is sort of similar to the OS X Dock. You can see screenshots or videos online.

If you are referring to the dock on the left than this is the root of the problem - just application icons and no individual windows.

User friendly or not, it is still a option and users here seemed to have assumed it is not. My point still stands.

You probably mean power users. But that's just a small percentage of the users. The majority doesn't bother to change the defaults even if there is a friendly settings widget to do it.

I hope you are sarcastic. making pcb's in eagle for exampel you want to use the schematic editor and the layout editor at the same time. interaction in one window will result in changes in th other editor.

but then i would say that the proper solution is two monitors or putting the windows on different workspace.

Easy, right click on the icon and select from the list - is it really that hard? really?

I like the approach Gnome shell is taking. The window management reminds me of a hybrid of CDE and WebOS. Minimized programs are treated as tiles or cards that can be grouped according to function. The only thing that's missing is a right-click app menu.

IMO, the perfect desktop OS would consist of a dock for frequently access apps, a right-click menu for less often used apps, and running apps would be shown as iconified tiles (small pictures updated in real-time, not icons) on the desktop. The only way that I've seen to get this setup thus far is a very hackish fvwm2 setup that uses ImageMagick to generate thumbnail previews for minimized apps.

Gnome Shell has its quirks, but it is nowhere near as bad as the crap they were putting out just six months ago.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure someone said the same thing about WIMP years ago...

First of all, it's harsh to judge like this unfinished software, secondly that doesn't prove current window management paradigm is better, maybe what's happening is that you and your wife spent a considerable time of your lives using one paradigm and unconsciously will reject anything different from that because it will have to spend an unnecessary amount of time getting used to something new.

See, some people hate new things, understandably, but there are also people who likes new things, and if we all keep technology halted because some people don't like these new things, what's going to happen to human society?

I myself, despite not liking very much this Gnome Shell, appreciate the effort Gnome guys are putting in trying new concepts, even if they fail, because if no one tries, how we will improve?

Gnome Shell is still fully WIMP oriented. Even if it itself can make some use of touch panels, the applications can't. No breakthrough here.

It is not true that in order to improve the experience you have to throw away stuff and start again from scratch. I'd be more happy if Gnome guys instead of rolling off another "best thing ever" had simply fixed the panel. After so many years it still gets messed up when I change the screen resolution and it is next to unusable in a vertical mode.