I installed and ran the latest Opensuse Tumbleweed just for the sake of testing Gnome 40. This linux distro had been installed in VMware Workstion 16, the latest version.
My first comment is the dispersion of Gnome settings over a wide array of things like Tweaks, Extensions, Taskbars, Applets, and the main Settings. They all should be aggregated into a single “Settings”.
The reason for this post is that after allowing icons in the desktop, every time I added program icons to workspace 1 it appeared duplicated in workspace 2. If I then delete the program icon in workspace 1, the same happened in workspace 2.
What is the point of having more than one workspace if they are all the same? Everything I do in one of them, it is cloned in all the other workspaces. I may have done something wrong or incomplete to allow different workspaces behavior, but this should be intuitive and as the default behavior.
Tweaks is a third party app doing somewhat unsupported stuff
Extentions is an optional extra
‘Taskbars, Applets’ - don’t exist so can’t comment on them (some suse thing?)
Desktop icons are not part of the standard shell experience (they are an extension) - given workspaces are dynamic I would have thought per-workspace layout would be rather chaotic and confusing probably just leading to things getting lost
Thank you for your prompt reply, which clarified the points raised in my post. I hope Gnome can proceed in improving its desktop software, as I find rather limited to have workspaces only to open different program windows.
Another feature I miss that is lacking in all linux desktops as far as I know, is the absence of a full screen preview of open programs in minimized windows, something that exists in Microsoft Windows since Window 7 back in 2009:
“Windows Aero Peek (also called Desktop Preview) is a new feature in Windows 7 that lets you “sneak” a preview of windows that are on your taskbar so you can more easily sift through the multitude of windows you use”
I use both linux and windows, in dual-boot computers, inside Windows 10 Subsystem for Linux (which will soon allow graphical programs), in VMware Workstation and lately in Oracle Virtualbox.
I don’t “need” taskbars, applets, tweak, extensions and desktop icons, I just complained about the dispersion of Gnome desktop elements into different setting options instead of having it all aggregated into a single integrated “Settings”.
It seems some of those elements are not advised or officially supported by the Gnome project. According to your opinion desktop items are outdated, so in your view, instead of a single or double mouse click to start an application, you’ll have to call a menu, navigate to the menu group of that application and then a second click to finally launch the application. In my opinion, simpler, even outdated (in your view), is always better than more steps to accomplish a certain goal.