Comment 42 for bug 683170

Sigh!!! This is really a problem. I use Ubuntu as a work machine. And sometimes have 30+ windows open. And the only way to manage it is by using workspaces. I am the owner of a software development company with 8 developers all running Ubuntu 11.04. I don't want to upgrade Ubuntu since I will lose the Gnome2 desktop when I do. And I need the Gnome2 desktop soley for the purpose of keeping workspaces separate. And so far Gnome2 has worked very well!

What would be ideal is to have the workspaces completely separate. Almost like when you go to another workspace you "switched" to another computer, knowing nothing that is going on in any other workspace. Bringing workspaces together in unity defy's the whole purpose of workspaces. It does not work. I tried using it. And it just doesn't work. Now things are a complete mess. It jumps form one workspace to another and I don't know what is going on. Windows are opening in the wrong workspaces because it switched to another workspace without asking me, or the animation was too quick for me to notice.

When I click "firefox" in one workspace, it will jump to another instance that is already open in another workspace. But I never wanted to move workspaces, if I wanted to I would have done so. If there wasn't a firefox open in the current workspace, then open one! When I am in one workspace I don't care what is going on in other workspaces. Each workspace is a context. Like I have an Email workspace, A workspace for each task I am busy with. A workspace for live servers (consoles, phpmyadmin->firefox, files, gedit windows etc) and a workspace for the local development server.

And Gnome 3 has exactly the same problem, and Gnome2 is not part of the ubuntu package anymore, so I don't have any other options, its like the days of workspaces is actually a thing of the past. And there is no workaround either for gnome3 or unity. So it seems like things are going backward for the user that uses ubuntu for work.

If it is a design choice then I need to search for another solution. So my questions are : What are the alternatives? Is there a solution for Unity to separate workspaces COMPLETELY? Is there a solution for Gnome3 to respond like this? Is there another Desktop that works like this except for KDE? I would really NOT like to switch to KDE since the file manager is not nice to use and things just don't work as reliably as the gnome based Desktops. Is ther a free tool for Windows 7 that actually works reliably and is stable? Will it actually help to start building a community to fight the option to have an extra checkbox in compiz-settings-manager to have this?