Despite the user study there are many, many, many many issues raised on reddit and elsewhere. please make this vertical.
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So lets wait for the designers to respond. Maybe there is a way to undo it. At least there is a way to undo it with extensions. I think now they know that many people love vertical workspaces.
gnome-shell gets way more attention than os-mockups
But why need feedback attention? The design team definitely read it if it is in os-mockups or in gnome-shell. And the redesign in general gets enough attention in the whole linux desktop community.
Out of interest: what are the current arguments for vertical placement (of desktops, apps + favorites in the overview page)?
Best usage of real estate on widescreen monitors, which are the majority of desktops. To be able to have workspaces (which gains you a good way to organize multiple windows) you need somewhere out of the way to have the switcher and launcher. Since you have more room on the horizontal axis you run the launcher and switcher vertically on each side. Or something along those lines.
yes, we already had this horizontal model. it was called docky and compiz and the current gnome was built as a better way. Having to switch virtual desktops/workspaces to see what is in them is going backwards. Wasting space with horizontal dock is going backwards.
The app grid is fine for me the way it is. I have no trouble moving in and out of it and rarely use it anyways. Not a good enough reason for a major change, much less one that is a step backwards.
I don’t know if workspaces will be cleanly separated with horizontal, but that’s important to me too. I don’t want to scroll through groups of windows like it’s a slideshow. The way the workspaces, launcher and overview works now is perfect for me.
I don’t trust that the user research is necessarily designed properly, or that the correct conclusions are being drawn from it. Where is this user research anyways?
There are plenty of little things that could be fixed in Gnome, but vertical orientation is not one of them.
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sorry that should have linked to a comment saying that theres going to be no option to change layout
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Hello!
@allanday or other members in the design team:
I missed to ask in the GitLab issue. How does the new Shell design work without workspaces (virtual desktops)? I cannot find a picture or note about it. Do we get more space for showing the window overview?
I’m happily using the Shell for many years without workspaces because the Shell does a great job in giving the necessary overview. This doesn’t mean workspaces bad, I just don’t use them.
Thank you
I belief that my solution to group and ungroup windows (see above) instead of creating and destroying workspaces solves the the question of vertical vs horizontal workspaces by ‘merging’ the concepts of windows and workspaces.
i had ignored that last part of your post for some reason. i was probably still irritated with your #1. 
Your solution might be an acceptable compromise, but i don’t see it as superior for someone who likes vertical workspaces and uses workspaces. I see the current design as best for them/me. There is no difficulty getting a mental model using vertical (when used correctly) that i have seen. Only people who aren’t grouping their windows using some logic. Then, of course you don’t know where your windows are because there was no system. Most people (including me) are not going to remember where they are in that case. That’s not how i use workspaces though. I don’t just randomly distribute windows all over the place and hope to find them later. I group them into the same workspaces every day and those workspaces are chosen by how the activities relate to one another and how often i engage in those activities. This is very productive for me and i always know where everything is. I understand that some people may not invent little systems like this, but gnome could easily demonstrate this to new users. I just believe that the current design is superior and that it is being watered down to appeal to the masses instead of setting a good example and showing people how to use it. Yes, it’s more trouble. Yes, people will complain. Most people i have installed gnome for like it, even if most of them don’t use workspaces at all, or properly. A little education might go a long way.
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Hey there. I realize you are receiving lots of feedback, so I don’t expect a direct answer, I am just posting here to provide more feedback and hopefully help the project achieve a better outcome.
Here is how I use GNOME Shell:
- Ubuntu 20.04 with v3.36.4.
- Two monitors with dynamic workspaces enabled only on the primary one.
- Left dock disabled for more screen space and fewer distractions.
- Using “Top Panel Workspace Scroll” extension for fast switching workspaces with the mouse wheel on the top bar (I also use the keyboard shortcut, but this is a great extension because I don’t need to open the overview or move one hand away from the mouse when using it to switch workspaces).
- Impatience extension enabled for faster animations.
- Overview screen accessed both via keyboard and hot corner when switching windows with the mouse.
- Extension enabled for switching windows only in the current screen/workspace.
So the major points for me on this change seem to be:
- I usually cycle through my workspaces without using the overview but I still use the mini workspace switcher on the overview screen. In the new design, it seems it is only available when opening the app grid, which doesn’t make much sense.
- I may have used the app grid 3 times in the last 2 years since the search is so much faster.
- I also rarely use the overview dock on the left, but when I do it is great that it is next to the hot corner.
What worries me is that this new workflow could be slower because these changes seem to be aimed at making the Shell more appealing to a larger audience. Hopefully, I am wrong, or at least the same agility will still be possible with some more extensions.
Hope this helps.
Thank you for the great work!
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I was just wondering if having the ability to disable workspaces and then treating the single workspace mode differently might solve things for people who find the current workspaces design troublesome, but i couldn’t remember what options were already available. In gnome tweak you can already set it to use one workspace. I have 9 windows open and i just did that i can see everything just fine, and so much reasoning about my desktop is achieved.
Maybe this is much ado about nothing? Why not just set one workspace as the default and call it a day? Then “power users” can enable multiple dynamic workspaces and everyone is happy. If there were some minor improvements to how single workspace mode worked, tweak that. No need to overturn the whole apple cart.
Hi there, I already commented on this on a GitLab issue. Because the GitLab issue has been closed, I thought I’d post a shortened version of my comment here for better visibility.
@aday wrote:
The reason for switching from vertical to horizontal, as described in the blog post, is to allow us to use the vertical axis for travel into and out of the overview, both in terms of the spatial model for the system, and specifically to have a coherent set of gestures and shortcuts for navigation.
As part of the design process, we did attempt to retain the vertical workspaces and use the horizontal axis for travel in to and out of the overview, but it never looked good or behaved well.
As far as I can think, it completely doesn’t matter for a touchpad or a touchscreen if the gestures are performed horizontally or vertically. If we can use a left-right-swipe to switch workspaces, we can also use a left-right-swipe to switch the view. Except if horizontal swipes are for whatever reason worse than vertical swipes, but why should view changes be first class citizens and workspace changes second class citizens then, and not the other way around?
As I think regarding touch devices input, the scrolling direction is irrelevant, I don’t think it actually is, but for other resasons.
Conventions
For decades of digital user interfaces, scrolling through things that don’t fit on the screen has been vertical. Unlike other UI conventions, this has been applied nearly everywhere: From mobile phones to PDAs to bank terminals to desktop UIs. You can even see Douglas Engelbart in his 1968 presentation of his graphical user interface scroll vertically.
But why is that so? Why has this convention been so widely adopted?
The reason lies in a much older convention, the convention of western writing. In western languages, letters are arranged horizontally, but then grouped in arrays of vertical lines. Having these lines not go for too long and break at a certain point is crucial for a good reading experience. That’s why nearly all books written for non-infants are printed in a portrait format. And this is also why all modern websites that are made with 16:9 screens in mind have max-widths for their text containers. And it’s why we’re used to scroll vertically.
So it looks like having both an app grid and a workspace overview that scroll horizontally does not only break the conventions within Gnome apps (I haven’t seen any plans to make Nautilus scroll horizontally) and the conventions established by 10 years of the Gnome shell. It breaks with the conventions of the world.
Keyboard and Mouse navigation
In fact, the design goals blog post states the following:
One of the nice things about having a simpler spatial model and directional gestures to navigate the shell is that it also helps keyboard navigation. This is because it allows for directional shortcuts (e.g. Super + PgUp to move to the workspace above) which are more intuitive than non-directional ones (e.g. Super + M to open the notification popover).
And it’s damn right.
Looks like the conventions about vertical scrolling are so wide-spread that they are even baked into our hardware: Keyboards have PgUp and PgDown keys stemming from the good old times, and most mouse wheels only move vertically. One of the coolest things about the current spatial model of the Gnome shell is that it works well with all of these input methods.
However, keyboards and mouses seem to become second-class citizens with the new horizontal design: While it doesn’t matter for touch devices, it’s unclear how the current mouse and keyboard navigation is going to work in the future.
Are Super+PgUp/Super+PgDown going to stop working in Gnome 40, or are they going to awkwardly move the workspace to the left and right?
Screen proportions
Although some people are lucky having a 16:10 screen, most screens today have a 16:9 aspect ratio. That’s why for layouts targeting desktop- or tablet devices, column-based layout are the way to go. You can see that on websites, were the long-awaited Flexbox and CSS Grid enable website creators to display columns on desktop where rows will be displayed on portrait-mode mobiles, forcing designers to maintain two layouts, but they think it’s worth it, because row-based layouts don’t work well on widescreen displays.
You can observe this on MacOS, where the workspace overview slices the already thin screen into three thinner rows, feeling awkward even on a 16:10 screen. In comparison, the current Gnome design does a pretty good job at dividing the aspect ratio into comfortably usable columns. I think it would be a pity if Gnome gave that up for repeating the design mistake Apple made in times of 4:3 screens.
Spatial design
I really like your idea of moving different views into a spatial model instead of having them just being “modes” that appear and disappear. The latter is very unpleasant from a designer’s perspective, and having three views that show different levels of overview expand the current model into something coherent. And I understand that within the perspective of this design of having these views positioned on-top of another, it makes sense to have the workspaces not also on-top of another.
However, I still have one problem with these views being positioned on-top of another vs. workspaces being positioned on-top of another, and it sums up into one question:
Where are my windows?
No, really, where are my windows in your model? Are they in the bottom view, overlapping and floating, or are they in one of the upper views, placed on workspaces?
If we really treat our views like places in our spatial model, these questions need to be answered. Because as of 2020, the nature of quantum mechanics are not very present in most people’s imagination, therefore it does not at all benefit the idea of a spatial model that the same things are placed at multiple places at the same time.
Currently in Gnome, the perspective change is represented as a “view mode change”. This is indeed not optimal for animations and gestures which work best providing a spatial model. But I don’t think we make it better replacing it with a spatial model that does not quite fit.
Conclusion
Finding a spatial model that fits the change of perspective offered by the window/activity overview requires more investigation, and I think it would be a pity if, after all this amazing work being done, doing scientific studies and showing all of these beautiful mockups, it just stopped with this concept that, if implemented in the current form, has consequences which receive some major and rectified criticism.
And there were pretty important things found out by these studies. For example, how much users prefer interfaces that convey spatial models of the views they’re interacting with.
One model that not only works with vertical workspaces, but also represents “where the windows are” would be a 3 dimensional one: As the three layers of the mockup show different perspectives of the same windows and workspaces, having the windows and workspaces getting smaller the more into “bird-perspective” the views get, it made absolute sense IMHO if the screen zoomed in and out between the perspectives that currently are planned to be displayed on-top of another. This could be conveyed by animations as well as touch gestures (pinching). This actually seems to be the spatial model behind Gnome’s current design, although it is not consequently worked out and, for example, leaves out workspaces. This is something that actually could be worked on.
In fact, we don’t need to do some fancy 3D rendering, everything needed to better portray the current spatial image of our workspaces would be shrinking the background image, draw a border around it and move the background image instead having it fixed when switching workspaces.
It is not worth to deploy a new spatial model into the minds of our users, as long as it doesn’t integrate well with their workflows, and most of all, the rest of Gnome’s design. After all, deploying massive changes at once nearly always leads to users blaming the whole concept for little problems with the realisation (which are inevitable). Same thing happened to Windows 8 (which btw. also featured horizontal scrolling on their start screen, which has been one huge target of criticism and been undone in Windows 10).
And this is not what I want to see here, as the concept it good: Showing the Activity view on boot absolutely makes sense, better portraying the workspace in a spatial image also. Good concepts like this deserve an incremental deployment, that doesn’t antagonise users by completely messing with their way of using the computer, and that can take feedback into account that will be targeted at the small implementation details that come up which each version and not a shitstorm that will unfairly be thrown at the whole concept. As much as I love the fact that there were scientific studies made for this, they were made in artificial environments that only portray the individual concept in isolation, and can’t replace actual real-world user feedback.
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I’m surprised that there are people who actually like the current vertical placement of the workspaces. I always thought is was a huge usability mistake…
Image you have five papers that you want to place on your desk. How would you order them? I think most people (in the western world) would order them from left to right and not from the top to the bottom. This is also how I imagine my windows on my desktop and so for me a horizontal design is a little bit more logic.
But interesting that people have different preferences about this!
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Some questions from a user that uses workspace heavily in daily life:
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Am I losing dynamic workspace with the new design? Dynamic workspace is the most useful part of GNOME for me but in video it seems there are only 3 workspaces (and some are empty). I never switch between apps, I put them into different workspaces and then switch workspaces quickly, 3 is too small for me.
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Is it easily to move app to other workspaces with the new design? With old design I can simply drag an app and drop it into the thumbnail of other workspaces, or create new workspace by dropping apps between thumbnails, but there seems no thumbnails, how can I do this? Do you mean I need to drag an app to the unclear screen edge and guess how suddenly the workspace will move like many phone? Oh no it’s painful, I do this every day and I need some precious way.
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Does the new design keeps the same or less operations to switch workspaces? With the old design I can just switch workspace with Super+PageUp/Down, but there is no PageLeft/Right key on my keyboard! Super+Alt+Left Arrow is a worse option because it needs more keys (I know it’s easy for some people to press more keys, but not people like me, less key is easier). Also, vertical layout is better because most people’s mouse can only scroll down/up, not scroll left/right! When I scroll down my mouse, it’s clearly that I mean down! It’s painful for user to learn “no, this is left”!
Anyway, the new design looks shiny and new things are always better than no change. But I am using GNOME Shell every day, not only for entertainment but also for my work. So I have to keep it efficient instead of just “looks cool”. If all the answers of my questions is “NO”, I suggest you to re-consider it.
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But your keyboard has PageUp/Down (not PageLeft/Right), your mouse can only scroll up/down, so I don’t think a horizontal layout is suitable for computer…
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Looks like you can only see all workspaces when you open app grid, no, I am not interested of app grid, I need a way to see both apps on my current workspace and thumbnails on all workspaces like now.
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I might be projecting my thoughts here, but one of the strengths of GNOME is how it doesn’t rely on a traditional desktop metaphor to be intuitive, so there’s no real need for your workspaces to be represented by anything physical (which would also be kind of complicated, do you mean to say you have 5 desks to represent workspaces side to side and you sit in different chairs for different activities?)
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Well, of course… Are you telling us that you stack your desks and move your chair up and down for different activities?!
On a serious note, I tend to agree that horizontal scrolling is just nasty and should probably be avoided for the most part.
However, I don’t think it would really be that bad as far workspaces go. If it’s implemented like the typical carousels that are widely used around the web or like a coverflow type widget it could potentially be very slick and usable.
But I don’t rely on workspaces very much anyway or really the app grid or that lame thing on the left that’s kind of like a dock but not really.
Honestly, as long as search and launching from search works as well as it does now everything else could disappear and I’d be a happy camper.
So I guess what I’m saying is let’s hope the people working on it really listen to those who actually use these features and ensure that they still work well for them while looking good in screenshots.
Yep. Replacing the desktop with the Overview, Dash and excellent keyboard usability was brilliant
GNOME did actually a lot of things right with GNOME3! The most critic afterwards was caused by removal of features or options. But I will never missed desktop icons or the system tray.
Computing often sticks with weird traditions, mere copies or tries to resemble the actual world blindly. The desktop metapher from Windows is one of this things. Even MacOS didn’t managed to get rid of the clutter of desktop icons. Well, Microsoft tried to replace the desktop icons with the tiles - but failed finally. It is always funny to see people ordering icons, fighting with resulting changes and minimzing windows to be able to click the icons 
Senseful change is a good thing.
Hey @hoshi. You’re not alone; in our research we found a high proportion of people not using workspaces at all. We certainly want any design changes to be appropriate in those cases.
One thing I’d suggest here is waiting until there’s an actual implementation to look at. The mockups in the blog post are probably a bit more generous when it comes to padding, which affects the proportion of the screen being used.
I’m definitely interested in having the design adapt to these single workspace cases and it might be that we could take some extra space from the sides. We’ll see!
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Hi @AlynxZhou, welcome! These are great questions.
Am I losing dynamic workspace with the new design?
No, we’re expecting them to remain dynamic by default.
Is it easily to move app to other workspaces with the new design?
It will be possible to drag a window to another workspace. As you drag the workspaces will zoom out to become smaller thumbnails.
Does the new design keeps the same or less operations to switch workspaces? With the old design I can just switch workspace with Super+PageUp/Down, but there is no PageLeft/Right key on my keyboard! Super+Alt+Left Arrow is a worse option because it needs more keys (I know it’s easy for some people to press more keys, but not people like me, less key is easier). Also, vertical layout is better because most people’s mouse can only scroll down/up, not scroll left/right! When I scroll down my mouse, it’s clearly that I mean down! It’s painful for user to learn “no, this is left”!
My understanding is that the old shortcuts will be supported in addition to the new ones.
It is unfortunate that Super+Alt+Arrow is more keys than Super+PgRight. On the other hand, Super+Alt are typically next to each other, and it’s really nice being able to use it in all four directions.
To be honest, I haven’t particularly come across people struggling to remap up/down scrolling to left/right.