 Ok, so hear me out, just last week the GNOME project had the GUADEC, which is the largest GNOME conference. And there was lots of cool talks about GNOME and its apps, obviously, but the one that stood up to me was about the future of the design of GNOME. And there's something big, GNOME wants to do tiling. So there's more stuff, though, should I start with the big thing or with the smaller stuff? Who am I kidding, let's talk about tiling. So what's the issue that needs to be addressed? Well, manually placing and sizing the windows can be fiddly work and requires close attention and precise motor control. Interestingly enough, tiling is here not presented as something to improve the workflow of super users but rather as an accessibility feature for, as an example, those without a great experience with computers. This fiddly work is what GNOME developers jokingly refer as a sh**t work. It is work that the user has to do which is generated by the system itself and has no other purpose. GNOME, rightfully, points out that most of the time you only need one or two windows, often just one window maximized, surely not a dozen different overlapping windows and yet that's the default today when you start opening apps as you need them. If you're new to computers, maybe you don't know how to clean that mess up through activities or virtual desktops. However, GNOME doesn't want to do tiling, tiling. They say that it's not a replacement for stacked floating window managers. And the issue is that the tiling window managers resize windows accordingly to the available screen space, even though most applications are designed to be used at a certain aspect ratio and size. As an example, chat applications are inherently narrow and tall and reading a PDF in a tiny window is, well, no fun. A positive example that GNOME brings is constrained window managers, such as EPAT OS, where you can create app groups and slide one floating up on the site, however, this really does not scale on larger screens or more applications. Then finally, we have the biggest sentence of the whole explanation, the key point that we keep on coming back in this work is that if we do add a new kind of window management to GNOME, it needs to be good enough to be the default. This is not some random option that needs to be turned on in system settings like in Kiri Plasma or I believe PopOS or any other distro. This has to be out of the box for everyone. I really respect a lot this GNOME approach. Their proposal is called Mosaic. You open a window, it opens centered on the screen at a size that makes the most sense for the application, weather application like this, web browser probably better maximized. As you open more windows, the existing ones move aside to make room for the newer ones. If a new window doesn't fit, it moves to its own workspace. If the Mosaic layout almost covers the entire screen, everything gets actually tied automatically. You can also decide to manually left tile a window, which is going to take half of the screen. If you do that and there is enough space, all other windows will move to the right and stay in the Mosaic's shape. If there's not enough space, GNOME will ask you which one other window you want to be tiled on the right portion of the screen and everything else moves to its own workspace. Of course, it's not just half screen, half screen tiling. You can also drag and drop a window above another to split the space occupied by them and freely resize them, allowing for more complex tiling options. Finally, a few applications might still require to be always shown above and floating normally. They don't provide any example, but if I had to guess, I would say stuff like a window recorder might still want to be floating. Applications will still be able to float normally above others, but it should be something that rarely happens. So my first impression of all of this is wow, just wow, wow, wow. However, if I had to wildly guess, if I had to, I don't think this is gonna work. It's just a guess and I really hope this works, but there's a big, big issue with it. That is, it assumes that windows do have a best size and they assume that this best size is not all the space available. I mean, take a text editor or a browser or a terminal or a system monitor and so on. My impression is using these applications on my computer that the more space these applications can take, the better. There isn't quite a best size for to adapt to. But I might be wrong here, however, even if there is a best size for all windows, it's really hard for GNOME to know about it. Okay, so GNOME applications can do whatever, obviously, but take third-party applications like KDE applications or Godot or Blender or Inkscape or anything that's not made by GNOME. Currently, there is no standard way to tell the window manager about the best size for your application. And even if such thing was introduced, I feel like it would take application ages to actually start setting this best size. And even if they do, GIMP, Inkscape, Blender, Godot, they're just gonna say, hey, give me as much space as you can, obviously, as I mentioned previously. Even worse, we use web browsers a lot. Web pages on a browser are kind of like applications, right? Except the window manager can't know anything about them. I might be opening a website that requires very little space and still my browser will end up being maximized, throwing all other windows in a different workspace. They just kind of skip on the browser side of the issues. But I feel like we humans do spend a lot of time in browsers, so I don't know. GNOME does mention the fact that we currently need more metadata to implement this. Currently, we have a fixed window size and minimum size. But we would also need some sort of maximum size, after which the content stops looking good. We would need a range of ideal sizes within which an application looks best, even though we could go smaller or bigger if necessary. Ideally, all of these properties should be dynamic. That is, they should depend on the content of the window. If you have an office document that's empty, well, then you don't need to ask for a lot of space. But if it's a superfall, then yeah, you do need more space. GNOME says, depending on the apps using a new system, APIs can be challenging and slow, and I agree. It's not easy to move the entire ecosystem. However, we think that there's a good chance of success in this case, due to the simplicity and universal usefulness of the API. And do let me say, I really hope they succeed, even though I feel like it's unlikely, unlikely, unlikely. OK, I can't pronounce. I genuinely love the concept and I would be the first to try it, I promise. That said, yes, I'm done talking about the tiling part of it, but the video ain't over because GNOME has presented a lot of other things that they're planning to implement. They are smaller stuff, but also stuff that will be implemented way sooner than this whole dealing thing. So technically, they are more relevant to us. Maybe I should have begun the video with them. So firstly, they are getting rid of the activities label on the top left. That's a pretty big deal. They will replace it with a workspace indicator. Basically, there will be one dot for each workspace, and the current workspace will get a highlighted and larger dot. The animation whilst switching between workspaces is just as pretty as it gets. And if you do click on the dots, then yeah, you get the overview. So good stuff. Of course, just like everything in this video, this work is in progress, and the actual implementation might be different. Even cooler, you can try this out right now. They made a GNOME extension that replaces the current indicator with this proposal. This, I think, is particularly worthy of praise as your system is so modular that your users can try out features from the next release to give feedback about them. So great. Next up, since one year ago, they've been working on a mobile version of the GNOME shell, which isn't yet upstreamed. In theory, that should happen in the near-ish feature. The coolest part, it brings to the gestures, meaning that you can go on the site and then go up, and that's going to work. Something that is exclusive to the GNOME as desktop, as no other desktop has anything like that. Then the login user grid. It's a much, much nicer representation of the users on the system with blur and everything. I mean, just look at it. There's nothing else to say, just it's pretty. I want it. And me too, me too. The notification calendar pop-up is also up for redesign. There's the idea of moving the notification to the system tree on the right to make space for a full calendar, which also has weather and different time zones and events. You can see here a lot of possible designs and layouts depending on the size of each element, clocks, weather, calendar. Also, do let me say that the notification in the system tree look good. Damn. Like real good. That's the right place for notifications. Another area they want to refresh is the search view. They are mostly happy with it, but they do want to make results a bit more clear by making the numerical results bigger and in their own cards and dividing everything in categories. Each content Tobias says could have its specific layout in the search result list. Nice. This was everything. So before you click away, do let me remind you that this video isn't sponsored by anybody. I'm not employed by Katie Orgnome. I wish if I'm able to do all of this and actually buy the equipment to do this, the microphone, the camera, the teleprompter, the lights, everything. And if I'm able to actually pay that it, everything is thanks to the awesome people around my face right now. And if you want to give in something like a little donation or join the Patreon, which has some benefits, like I try to do some sort of podcast at least once a week. It should be daily, but it's at least once a week now. You know, you can join in and donate something and make sure that I keep on doing these videos, which isn't granted. Thanks, everybody. Neck out.