I was going to do an origin character as a solo play-through and a custom character for a group play-through with my mates, but now I might do it the other way around... which means hours in the character creator! Ha.
vampatori
joined 1 year ago
Yes, I love it! Really it's the MacOS-like "Expose" feature that I find to be essential.
I would advise against using workspaces though, I find those actually sort of go against the core idea of it IMO. There are a few things I'd really like added to it, but for the most-part when you get into it it's great.
My main desktop I have 4 monitors (I know, but once you start a monitor habit it's really hard to not push it to the limit - this is only the beginning!) It roughly breaks down into:
- Primary work (usually a full-screen editor)
- Terminals (different windows, some for the project, some monitoring)
- Browsers - documentation, various services, my own code output
- Communication - signal, discord, what's app (ugh), etc.
The key, literally, is you just press the Super key and boom, you can see everything and if you want to interact with something it's all available in just one click or a few of key presses away.
On my laptop with just one screen, I find it equally invaluable, and is actually where I started to use it the most - once again, just one press of Super and I can see all the applications I have open and quickly select one or launch something.
It's replaced Alt + Tab for me - and I know they've made that better, and added Super + Tab, but none of them are as good as just pressing Super.
The things I'd really love added to it are:
- Better tiling (including quarter tiling). It's a sad state of affairs when Windows has far better tiling than Gnome.
- Super then Search, I'd like it to filter the windows it's showing and shrink/hide the others, along with a simple way to choose one using the keyboard.
- Rather than having an icon for each window, I also want the tooltip information to always be shown (e.g. vs code project) and for standard apps to expose better information for that (e.g. Gnome Terminal to expose its prompt/pwd) and/or have a specific mechanism by which apps could communicate.
- Adding Quicksilver-like functionality to the launcher/search would be amazing. e.g.
- Super
- Sp... (auto-populates Spotify)
- Tab
- P... (auto-populates Play/Pause)
- Return
- Session restoration - it just doesn't work at the moment for some reason. Some apps do, some don't. Some go to their correct position/size, some don't.
Are there any good alternatives?
We've started using Jitsi for video/screen-sharing and that's going well so far - but it's based very much around the "corporate meeting" concept, rather than "playing D&D with mates" or "online gaming with people".
Mumble is decent enough for voice comms, but of course lacks video, which for my friend group is a deal-breaker. While the audio quality is noticably better most of the time, its noise suppression is not as good as Discord. It does have text chat, but lacks the utility of Discord's chat - which we use in D&D for sharing information, images, note-taking, etc.
Things do game tracking/voice like Steam, Xbox Live, PSN, etc. but then each only supports their own platforms and services - whereas Discord is common to all.
I think what DIscord does well is bring together a few really established, tried and tested technologies, under one roof and integrates them seamlessly. There is definitely value in that, and I would be really interested in an open source/self-hosted equivalent.
My main concerns with Discord are:
- They inevitably ramp up income earning opportunities and therefore eventually compromise the system.
- It can't be catalogued/searched easily.
- It seems like a near-perfect platform for harvesting data for ML (and the platform has some traction with the ML community already).
Same - for Windows it's by far and away the best PDF reader for me. It's shocking how far down the bloat rabbit hole Adobe Reader has gone!
Definitely give Ruthless a go, I love it.. reminds me of early game ARPG's on higher difficulties. Positioning really matters, you have to adapt based on what you get. It seems to have been the proving ground for PoE2's new tempo.