They're overthinking this issue far too much. People actually like that windows disappear into the background, it emulates the idea of stacks of paper (very intuitive) and it allows you to both focus on the stuff that's currently important and with relative ease bring out windows from the background into view again, through the use of alt-tab or the super key. (or by clicking the little part of the background window still visible, as done by all beginner users of a window system, a very intuitive move)
Call me a luddite but we don't need more innovation, just implementation.
- Windows should be able to tile in corners for a 4 window equal size layout by default in gnome, you currently need a plugin for it.
- A way to set up standard locations for windows, best managed in some kind of "work-profile"/"entertainment-profile" way, in a tileable-esque system. This is not something most people will use, but is very helpful for people who want to get back into the workflow of a relatively complex window layout. Say you use three screens, and have a editor, devtools, browser-production, browser-docs, and chat window or music player open. Getting these windows back into a standard location can be done with various secondary tools already, but it's never been implemented by an OS standard. Some applications with floating dockable windows already implement it for their floating windows, like Inkscape.
And that's it. Bear in mind I really think that this is taking the window managment the last 10% of the way, it's fine as is. Not just fine, good and borderline great.
>For a web browser that might be maximized, for a weather app maybe only 700×500 pixels
Those examples of "mosaic" tiling reeks of theoretical idealism. Almost no applications work in an area as small as what, 17% of total screen estate. Taking a weather app as an example is close to disingenous, that's the definition of an outlier regarding small windows. A common "small" window is something like a file manager or a OS settings page, and those arguably take up __at least__ 35% of screen real estate to work well, and are more commonly given a whole 50%. (half-side view)
Their demonstration goes on to demonstrate them opening 3 different weather apps and having them move around in the mosaic, like the demonstration shows a groundbreaking new way to manage what, weather apps? Completely disregarding the fact that a weather app is opened, read, and then closed. You dont' monitor the situation of the weather in your anyones workflow.
Now there are users who use very complex window layouts of very small windows, like some people working in sound production, but they don't want their windows to magically just shuffle around the center of the screen, they want the "open this window in this standard location/size every time im in work-profile mode".