I have been thinking about @tbernard’s post Rethinking Window Management and how the new tiling window manager will affect the Activities Overview:
The picture above is shown at the top of Tobias’s post, and shows a lot of windows overlapping. Currently, the Activities Overview is used to deal with that kind of situation. You open it, and all those open windows are shown without overlap.
But once the new tiling manager is implemented, all open windows will be shown without overlap all the time, without having to open the Activities. Meaning, the Overview will become irrelevant. If you open it you will just see the same windows you were already seeing, except a bit smaller.
That being the case, why not do away with it altogether? Why not remove the Activities Overview and replace it with something like this?
The devs seem to already have gone that route for mobile devices: “In case you’re wondering where the “overview” state with just the multitasking cards (like we had in previous iterations) went – After some experimentation and informal user research we realized that it’s not really adding any value over the row of thumbnails in the app grid state. The smaller thumbnails are more than large enough to interact with, and more useful because you can see more of them at the same time.”
Wouldn’t it make sense to do the same on desktop devices, since the same logic also applies? What do you think? I’d really like some feedback on this.