Comment by ryukoposting
3 hours ago
> I would personally be very happy if I could organize applications how we can organize files, and simply reopen a work session where I left it
This statement reminds me of Sugar, the desktop originally developed by One Laptop Per Child. Sugar is basically the exact inverse of where mobile is going, so it's kinda interesting to look back on.
Sugar tries to blur the line between files and applications. Instead, you deal in "activities" which are a file, bundled with certain context (ex: what program opens it), all in a pretty flat hierarchy.
The way Sugar does things, w there isn't a "File -> Open" in sight. All file opening happens from that Activities menu.
To be clear: Do I think we should just take what Sugar does and put it in GNOME? Hell no! Sugar is very simplistic by design, it's not suitable for adult productivity. But, it's an immediately intuitive concept. Imagine if the app drawer was a chronological list not of every app, but of every thing you've worked on in all apps.
I think that's an idea worth exploring, maybe for tiling WMs specifically where maintenance of the desktop itself (arranging it, organizing it, etc) is such a dominant part of the experience.
Kind of how windows's old document-first paradigm worked. Of course we didn't have a name for it at the time since it was just how computers worked. You could open Word and select open, but 95% of the time you double clicked on a word file. You can't do this on phones for some reason.
The term "activities" icks me out though, it's totally not obvious what that means. Maybe it is obvious in context but it feels a bit like having every explorer window start with a heading "files and folders" or your desktop says "desktop". If it's really good UI you shouldn't need a label for the whole collection like that.