Some of us think spatially

I keep feeling like there has been a coup, and our nice spatial desktop has been supplanted by people who only know left from right when it is written on their sleeves!

I use a 3x3 matrix of virtual desktops w/ large dual screens as my development system. I have deeply trained habits for which virtual desktop has what sort of activity, and most are paired for single hot-key movement between related sets. I have multiple browsers, dozens of xterms, 4 or more emacs windows, and other assorted programs that come and go.

E.g. email/IM/browsing is one step away from calendar/general office tools. But it is also one step way from code editor, deployment, and log watching shells, and another browser and set of terminals where I test web services. And that development space is also one step away from sysadmin/virtual machine management screens. About 50% of my virtual desktops are empty in adjacent slots to these work areas, so I can configure other more specialized working sets which are also related to development, sysadmin, or office work.

I have also experienced how GNOME has slowly abandoned my workflow. Session management used to work, but is now a crapshoot. It often fails to restore my many xterms to their proper locations on differnet workspaces. Sometimes in the middle of a yum update, it suddenly slams them all to the same 80x25 size and same location even in the middle of an existing session!