The windows organization

When multiple windows are opened the desktop can soon become a mess, fulfilled with many windows covering the others and to find your application can be really frustrating. The GNOME Shell offers multiple possibilities to help the user to handle multiple windows.

The absence of a classic windows list like in others desktop environments could initially make you feel lost, it’s never easy to change your habits. After years of MS Windows, Apple OS X, GNOME and KDE the new GNOME Shell solution will surely appear unfriendly to adopt but after the initial approach it should you result really simple and natural.

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Exploring the GNOME Shell (part 1)

When you access to your GNOME 3 desktop for the first time, most probably you’ll see such image, a clean desktop with blue stripes on the background and no icons at all on the so called Desktop.

As you can soon discover, there’s not a classic desktop like the previous GNOME releases (or MS Windows and Apple OS X), no files can be saved on the desktop, neither it reacts to right clicks. This is the default behavior but can be modified to restore the classic desktop with icons in the background behind the windows. We’ll see later how to control the desktop behavior.