GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 602182
Does not remember the number of workspaces on restart
Last modified: 2011-06-28 19:43:37 UTC
Every time I restart my session I end up with only one workspace, with all the restored apps on it. That really breaks the idea of workspaces since I have to restore my organization of them manually. Is that supposed to work ATM? FWIW, mutter is exiting with code 1 when I close my session - could it be that there's a problem on stop?
How are they restored? By XSMP? If so, I'm not sure that is something we should support for 3.0.
Are you talking about the applications? I guess they are restored using different techniques, including XSMP, but also simpler implementations (gnome-terminal). It's not what I'm complaining about here, anyways. I'd just like to get as many workspaces as I had when closing my session when I restart it. Is that intended to work currently? I remember that Colin pushed some code about restoring some time ago, but I can't find the reference now.
Colin wrote some app-restoring code in bug 594802 but that was never pushed. Mutter presumably does not save the number of configured workspaces when it saves its state, since we haven't changed that code from metacity, and metacity doesn't let you change the number of active workspaces to something other than what's stored in gconf. And even if we did restore the number of workspaces correctly, gnome-shell deletes any workspaces that don't have windows on them at startup, so that would happen before the restored apps were started. This could all be fixed, if we wanted to.
OK, so this is just a matter of setting the Mutter GConf key to 1 by default, and save the number of workspaces to it. Then the Shell could stop removing all workspaces on start. I guess it would be good to have anyways - what should and could happen to applications is another issue.
(In reply to comment #3) > Colin wrote some app-restoring code in bug 594802 but that was never pushed. > > Mutter presumably does not save the number of configured workspaces when it > saves its state, since we haven't changed that code from metacity, and metacity > doesn't let you change the number of active workspaces to something other than > what's stored in gconf. And even if we did restore the number of workspaces > correctly, gnome-shell deletes any workspaces that don't have windows on them > at startup, so that would happen before the restored apps were started. Why were we doing that again? Because the default workspace count is 4, and if you were only using one then you'd get blanks? The best fix would be to implement the single-workspace view from bug 593844, then we could probably safely delete the delete-empty-workspaces code, and people who are transitioning from single-workspace won't see four big blank squares and wonder what the heck is going on at first sight. (Leaves open the question of the default number of workspaces of course, which I do think should be 1)
(In reply to comment #5) > Why were we doing that again? Because the default workspace count is 4, and if > you were only using one then you'd get blanks? Well, we explicitly want the default to be 1, but it's controlled by a key in metacity's schema, so the way things work right now, mutter can't have a different default from metacity.
Here is another use case: Every morning I have to - re-add my 3 other workspaces because I am used to 4 - move my autostarted apps to the correct workspaces what would be nice in this case is: - either remember the number of workspaces or provide a config option [ other than manually using gconf ] - provide a way to tell my startup-apps which workspace they prefer (kde has had this for a while)
*** Bug 616150 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 631801 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Adding my two cents on this, I find that having to recreate the nine workspaces I'm used to use (devilspie here) every time I start the shell and then having to move all the autostarted apps is a major pain. Would it be possible to set a configured number of workspaces at startup? I don't mind having an obscured config setting with a default of one workspace, so that new users are not confused, however I would really benefit from starting with more (and I think other people would, given the number of duplicated bugs :) ). PS: I am not sure if I should bump an old bug, but this one is referenced by many other duplicates, hence I posted here. Feel free to spank me if I did it wrong
I think this bug can be close as in the new implementation the user has no choice on number of workspaces to create.