Reply to post: Re: Gnome2/Mate-like desktop switcher -- avaiable in unity?

A perfect marriage: YOU and Ubuntu 16.04

thames

Re: Gnome2/Mate-like desktop switcher -- avaiable in unity?

@pyite - If you're asking about the virtual desktop switcher in Unity, it's been there all along, just disabled by default.

System Settings ==> Appearance ==> Behaviour ==> Enable Workspaces.

I haven't upgraded from 14.04 to 16.04 yet (it hasn't come up in the updater yet), but I have 16.04 in a VM and just checked and it's still the same there. This is the same place by the way that 16.04 lets you decide whether to put the application menus in the top bar, or in the application window. The desktop switcher appeared immediately when I changed the settings, but this was running in a VM, so if there is something different about video on bare metal you might need to log out and back in again.

The keyboard short cuts to use them will appear on a cheat sheet if you hold down the super (flag) key. Basically though, cntrl-alt arrow key works the same as in Gnome 2, and there are some other short cuts as well. If you have an application window already open in another desktop and you left-click on the launcher icon, it will take you to whatever desktop it is on (middle click still launches another copy, and right click still brings up a launcher menu).

I suspect that workspaces are turned off by default because it confuses newbies coming from other operating systems. They hit the wrong hot key combination and when everything "vanishes" think that all their applications have simultaneously crashed. I know that this confused me mightily the first time I encountered it back in Mandrake (KDE) days. Of course once I found out what they were, I couldn't imagine doing without them.

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