David From Space

You′re walking in the woods

There’s no one around and your phone is dead

Out of the corner of your eye, you spot them

(Written in Rust)

They’re following you, about 30 feet back

They get down on all fours and break into a sprint

They’re gaining on you

“Written in Rust!”

You’re looking for your car but you′re all turned around

They’re almost upon you now

And you can see there’s blood on their face

My God, there′s blood everywhere!

Running for your life (from writing in Rust!)

They’re compiling a knife (it′s written in Rust!)

Welcome to the Fediverse! Thanks for the post, I love your authorial tone!

I will check out Polonium! Thanks!

I know you said Gnome, but if you are willing to look at Plasma, I’ve just started using Bismuth on KDE Plasma and I think it can do at least a chunk of that. It can set particular sizes with Window Rules, it looks to have a quite robust shortcut system, including resizing windows, swapping, rotating, or changing layouts. As for the focus vs open, KRunner lets you choose the active application when you type it’s name. There’s also this: https://github.com/academo/ww-run-raise but I have not used it and cannot vouch for that.

What are you doing with your machine that would be confusing for your standard end user? KDE out of the box is good enough for my daily driving. PopOS, Bazzite, and Mint work great. GUI options for most normal computing things you’d do these days. The amount of customization allowed on an end user’s machine is often minimal anyway. Plus, you sorta imply that the end user would be doing all this, instead of an IT admin preconfiguring a machine with Ansible or a custom install script. I think you may be over estimating what your typical business user does. It’s mostly “Here’s my chat, here’s my browser, here’s my 1-5 LOB apps, here’s my printer. Can I change my background to my kids? Great.”

Between cloud apps and RemoteApp technology, there is a pretty decent chance for Linux desktops with Windows servers becoming the norm, again, for smaller size businesses. Organizations I work with still use thin clients, which - what’s the difference? And based on end user reactions to the UI when upgrading to Windows 11 - all change is hard. They’d get used to it fast. Especially if it acts mostly like Windows 10.