I usea a tiling wm(sway) so workspaces are part of my workflow. 1: browsers 2: terminals 3: terminals(part 2) 4: chats(XMPP, LXMF, email...) 5: IDE(helix) 6: games(supertuxkart) 7: keepassxc 8: Tor browser 9: misc 0: music
this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2025
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They're great for work from home, especially when sharing screens. My background and task panel changes when I change desktops, and a script controls which Firefox profile is the default.
So one VD is work, another is play.
Yep, really only use them at home
-Native desktop is for random shit
-"Fun" is for games, and... Fun stuff
-"Work Shit" is work shit
-"Bidness" is for home stuff that's not necessarily mindless entertainment. Banking, home projects, etc
"Schoo" is for college
Bidness desktop is the only one that's a giant beast. So many windows and tabs, each FF instance is relating to a home project with a ton of tabs, can be car shit, electronics, networking, whatever. So much shit. It's like having too many tabs open but exponentially bad.
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I keep forgetting that virtual desktops are a thing that exists.
because at least on windows, they just don't work well
shit always opens on the wrong desktop, they're slow and glitchy. it's just a pain
I just have four monitors
very infrequently I use virtual desktops for particular things, but too often I need to see the secondary shit while doing the primary and also have a meeting or tertiary info up while accessing chat
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Reminds me of compiz in the old school days. The desktop cube was the (impractical) shit!
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I don't "get" virtual desktops. I mean I've tried them out and don't care for them. I'm curious if those who do are using single monitors or low resolution?
I've got triple monitors and 8-10 virtual desktops full at any given moment. Lots of multitasking. Lots of context switching where I don't necessarily want to close out any windows. Tilling WM.
Kind of thinking about adding more virtual desktops...
Even with multiple monitors, they are still useful. I use them to separate different tasks so I can switch back and forth with a keyboard shortcut.
I can't stand virtual desktops. I have 4 monitors specifically so I can have as many things visible at once at possible without switching. I work from home so this is my machine I use for everything. 1 monitor for main task or games, 1 for side tasks, 1 for media or even more side tasks, and 1 exclusively for work and personal chat. My top monitor is very large so I often have 2 or 4 different things going on at once side by side on that one. I disable virtual desktops and tiling windows on every operating system I've used.
If my GPU had more outputs, I would have more monitors. I also have a 2nd computer with a single 1080p monitor to the right (I have an L desk) for home network stuff, usually keep my security camera feed on that one.
I respect anyone who does use virtual desktops because I acknowledge that if you master the workflow, it can be more efficient if you have more than like 5 or 6 tasks going at once (vs 4 monitors), however I will die on the hill of never ever using them.
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Desktop 1: The things I'm supposed to be doing
Desktop 2: The things I'm supposed to be doing but I forgot I'm not on desktop 1
Desktop 3: The secondary things I'm supposed to be doing but I forgot these windows were already open on desktop 1
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How I use virtual desktops:
I don't. Everything fits on one screen, if it doesn't I close tasks and leave a note to get back to it.
Does anyone else never use them ever?
Multi-monitor setups make more sense to me, but I don't even use that anymore after switching to a 65" 4K gaming OLED as my primary monitor. Its like having four 32" 1080p monitors arranged in a grid, except without any bezels. Plenty of screen real estate for anything I need to do.
Does anyone else never use them ever?
Indispensable on laptop computers!
Never used them in my life and I've been machine computing over 25 years. Always one monitor, one desktop. I close shit I dont need regularly, I click on icons on the tab bar to get to the app I need. The tab bar is wide enough to hold like 30+ of them. Why do I need more than one desktop? Windows go over another, the tab bar shows everything I have open. Why switch? I never got it.
Tiling WMs are just faster. So much faster. They remove so much annoyance it's really hard to put it to words. Binding programs to workspaces is what finally sealed the deal for me.
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I took long train rides for a few years, where I'd work with a laptop, so my entire workflow is now single-monitor. I frequently sit down at workplaces at $DAYJOB where I would have two monitors and then I disable one of them, because it's just genuinely not useful to me.
And if that didn't terrify you, I also prefer touchpads now. π
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Let me fix that for you
I am one of the people that never uses them, and I think I finally realized why: ADHD.
I usually turn them off, and if there's a part of the GUI dedicated to them, I disable that too. I thought it was to save screen space, but honestly I think it's more so that I won't lose windows to virtual desktops I forgot existed.
I think the tendency to forget things and to occasionally space out and forget what I'm doing has led me to value persistent visual artifacts of whatever I'm doing. That means a visible taskbar with the clock, system tray icons, and application icons, plus terminal windows even if they are idle. Somehow, scanning back and forth across 4 monitors -- even if virtual desktop people reading this can do it much faster their way -- just works better for me.
This touches on something that's actually much deeper that I have been doing for myself:
Sometimes if you do things in a way that plays nicely with your personal neurospice cocktail rather than the more efficient way you "know" that you "should" be doing them, it just makes your life better and that is the whole damn point for why we are working on the computer in the first place.
I can absolutely see myself buzzing around virtual desktops with keyboard commands. I have experimented with desktop setups in the past. I remember for a while in college I was running some kind of 3D desktop program where I had a virtual space where I could move windows and icons around. You could hang images floating in the air like paintings. And this is on 25 year old hardware! I think my GPU was a Geforce 2 GTS. Giga-texel shader baby!
Desktop 1 for regular stuff.
Desktop 2 for porn.
Desktop 1 for porn
Desktop 2 for porn also
Four monitors, all with porn on it.
Desktop one for straight porn, desktop two for gay porn, desktop three for lesbian porn, desktop four for yiff.
The real work came up from setting up sound streams from all of these to be fed through an HRTF LADSPA plugin to make sound from a given source sound like it was appropriately-located relative to its position on the grid.
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I have mine as
- Fronted
- Backend
- Database
- Browser
- Music
- Project management
- Messaging/Email
All bound to Meta+h/j/k/l/y/u/i and have a bash function to run and configured to go to the right places. KDE is good
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This post made me look into virtual desktops on my laptop and I can easily double the current amount of desktops from 2-4 under settings.
Biggest problem with that is that I almost never use more than my first virtual desktop unless I'm working on multiple things and need to switch to not get caught working on one of them over the other.
I have 3 screens:
- Main screen for whatever i'm doing incl Browser
- Gaming screen wiith Steam and Heroic Launcher
- Comms - Signal, emaiil, discord, everything KDE Connect
- random shit not fitting anywere
- Piracy town: qbittorent, jdownloader, Browser with MANY sources
The second one has many many status widgets, Dolphin, fSearch and a Firefox window that's my media player, always in the background without any title bars or borders running the deezer webpage as WPA
The third one is connected with a 10m HDMI cable and is not running often, is just used to watch movies :-)
desktop 1 for what i should do, desktop 2 for the rest. when the door opens switch to desktop 1 lightning fast
Tabs for nerds
Is it just me who has the multiple shame workspaces of totally not abandoned personal projects?
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I have attention dilly dally, so virtual desktops are a huge help to stay on one task at a time.
Awesome WM so independent "workspaces" per monitor.
Central monitor:
- browser for searches, gitlab, articles, lemmy
- IDE
- maybe another IDE
- some other term...
- signal
- spotify ... goes up to 8
Side monitor:
- browser with email/communicators/discord/docs
- runtime so cargo, node, actual app running
- additional term
- additional term... ... goes up to 8
Laptop: Just one workspace with terminal
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I never got into these at all. My coworker thought it was crazy that I never did. I just get a bigger monitor to fit all my stuff, lol. Right now, it's a 49" ultrawide and have no issues.
Desktop 7 needs to pull themselves by the bootstraps and get a job. Useless.
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