It may not be of interest to you personally, but the growing popularity of tiling window managers means there’s a lot of demand for this type of feature.
As long as they give the user the ability to opt out/in, what’s the harm in introducing it?
The key point we keep coming back to with this work is that, if we do add a new kind of window management to GNOME, it needs to be good enough to be the default. We don’t want to add yet another manual opt-in tool that doesn’t solve the problems the majority of people face.
In the end, this is an open platform and if they make something I don’t like, I’ll just use something else. But that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t voice what I see as a misstep forward taking gnome further from the kind of interface that made it so successful.
But they also say that the classic “floating” window state would still be one of the three options. In this case, this would effectively allow users to keep the “standard” behavior if they want.
Yeah, the “classic” mode. Let’s just say that I don’t believe them. Or that it won’t last long. I’ve been around long enough to see gnome change drasticly for the design teams pet projects, and usually flying in the face of what users actually ask for.
Which is really all I’m saying, this is another step by the gnome design team, away from the reasons that users originally picked gnome. You might be a fan of tiling window managers, but general users, especially ones who have picked gnome for potentially decades, generally won’t be.
Not going against Gnome here, but against your last sentence.
As long as they give the user the ability to opt out/in, what’s the harm in introducing it?
Pretty sure systemd did this with a lot of things and started removing things they just didn’t like. Can’t find the website I wanted to link, but it included a lot of reasons why systemd isn’t good (for example, binary logging. Why ?) “You can always opt out” doesn’t work in the real world ; people don’t care enough to switch. Why do you think google is the biggest search engine ? Mainly because it’s the default everywhere.
In this context I guess it doesn’t matter (and I couldn’t see myself using gnome, even if it has some good polish), it’s just that “you can always opt out” leaves a bad taste on my tongue.