Source : Internet
Member-only story
117 People Waited 21 Years for One Feature. It Finally Arrived.
Every expert who looked at it said it could not be built, and they closed the case. The one who reopened it had never written a line of that kind of code.
On 12 June 2005, Kjetil Kjernsmo opened a bug report. He asked for one small (!) thing.
He had more than one monitor. He wanted each screen to show a different virtual desktop, on its own, without the others moving with it.
A virtual desktop is just a separate workspace you switch between on the same screen: email on one, your editor on another, a browser on a third, so you are not piling every window into one cluttered space. What Kjetil wanted was one per monitor, each switching on its own.
Unix desktops have had virtual desktops more or less forever. The idea is usually traced back to Xerox PARC in 1986 and a research system called Rooms, built at the same lab whose work was borrowed by Apple for the first Macintosh. X11 window managers shipped it within a few years: vtwm, released in 1990, was named for its virtual desktop, and by 1993, fvwm baked one into what became one of the most widely used window managers on early Linux. A Linux user in 1993 could already spread work across four virtual desktops…
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Written by Can Artuc
The architect. Dad. 20+ years in tech. I only write experience-backed stories about Linux and open source. E-mail: c@canartuc.com.
Hey Can,
I'd like to thank you for your shared stories as they sometimes are a bit nerdy in the best sense - if you don't mind it. It wakes some kind of nostalgy which I like really much as an old Unix/Linux veteran - who has been falling in love…
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I'm typing this on OpenSuSE/KDE Plasma, which has been my platform for almost thirty years. This is the first I've heard of this, but by tonight, FREEDOM!!!Thanks, Can.
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As someone who worked on the transition from KDE3 to KDE4, these stories are really precious to me and very, very well written. It is a refresh to see real stories, beautifully crafted, in a world inundated with AI generated text. Kudos to you and keep going!
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