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yeah except that it creates additional overhead from managing those windows to be on the "right" desktop... I use Windows and I found two tools that make window management a lot better than anything that's readily avaliable on Linux - or at least I'm not away of this... here's the workflow i found most effective

• every window on the same desktop (no virtual desktop tool here)
• taskbar on autohide
• switch between rescent programs via alt-tab
• switch to programs not used rescently via ctrl-meta-tab... for me that opens an expose like screen with incremental on-type search for a window title and selection via keyboard... no mouse needed. having 20 putty windows open? just start typing the servername, username or whatever is in the title of the window you'd like to switch to
• arrange windows on any border or corner of the screen, maximize vertically or horizontally (in addition to what you can do by default) - all with the keyboard.... ctrl-meta-numKey to put it into any corner or border, ctrl-meta-down for max vertical, ctrl-meta-right for max horizontal...
• launch programs, open documents, start putty sessions etc with launchy which comes up with ctrl-shift-space
• plus some global hotkeys to my liking like ctrl-meta-m opens/activates thunderbird, ctrl-meta-a TBs address book, ctrl-meta-n TBs new mail window...
• all hotkeys completely configurable... I just used ctrl-meta because I found it easy to press and not used by anything else...
• tools used: Switcher, SecondShell, AutoHotkey, Wizmouse (for *nix like scrolling)

that said: I really liked Gnome2 but Gnome3 (let alone Unity) is fubar... Sure there's MATE but I wouldn't bet that this will be around for too long - at least not in any usable state... Look at trinity... it's avaliable but it seems abandoned... same will be true for MATE... And XFCE is lightweight and all but I really want a full fledged DE but one that performs and one that lets me set it up to my liking... Gnome2 was this...

BEWARE OF THE RANT THAT FOLLOWS
And KDE is consistent, configurable and all but it also pisses me off for that thingy up right and nepomuk... Also even with a rather powerful machine KDE feels sluggish compared to Windows and no, I can't live with the slightest delay when there's no apparent reason for it... Desktop effects are one reason for this but I find KDE looses a big chunk of usability if you disable them all and completely... I never understood why they had to implement their own stuff there... Compiz worked well enough, even back then, and it was performing swiftly... the KDE effects on the other hand are still sluggish after all this time - even on a powerfull machine... And then there's this bug in the print dialog... Some distros incorporate a hackish fix that works for 99% of the users, some don't... KDE doesn't by itself because it's upstream but why would I give a shit about who's to blame as a user? All I know is that the KDE printing dialog doesn't respect a printers default settings and it doesn't save settings either... I don't care if it's QTs fault... There's a fix that does away with the problem for 99% of the people and KDE won't use it because it's an upstream bug... Thing is: Nokia gives a shit... They've known this bug for more like 3 years now and openly showed that they won't fix it... they're not even considering is seriously... They're ignoring it... KDE knows that and they're stubborn... Problem shifted to distros and some of those (including Ubuntu) shift it to the user... I mean: they could as well switch to open printing but they're not doing this either... now THAT's the reason Linux doesn't get a grip on the desktop... because politics by people with 10" sticks in their rectums get fought out on the

Tabbed browsing makes sense. You have one application, a web browser, with multiple pages, taking up less screen space. It's tabbed so you don't have to click on a bunch of minimized windows or use Expose or whatever shiny workalike the Gnome / KDE bunch has now to find what you want, and so you aren't cluttering up the desktop with a hundred web browser windows.

However, there is something to be said for separating out the different applications and simply clicking the icon or what have you, to switch between them. In fact, isn't that what Windows has had for about 15 years now? Sure, the application tab bar goes on the bottom the screen by default, and is called the "Start Menu" but it is essentially, exactly what is proposed here.

The problem is that you end up filling up the bar, and then having to collapse the bar in one of several ways, all of which are annoying.

Expose, or whatever the Gnome / KDE equivalent is, is so much handier.

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Switcher is a Windows version of Expose which offers great customization. If you want to combine the best of OSX and Windows, you absolutely need Switcher. I find myself using the taskbar 2/3 of the time, but there are definitely times when the wonderful Expose-like behavior is the most efficient way to switch between windows. Map it to a 4th or 5th mouse button.

So true. I don't want to think of how many hours I've spent searching "windows expose" on google. There are a couple of crappy implementations, but none of them are really usable. I used switcher for a while, but it only works if you set the process priority to maximum and it's difficult to make that preference persistent.

The biggest thing that I want is the ability to switch to the desktop, do work, then switch back to my active windows. In Vista and prior it can't be done. I'm not sure about 7, because I haven't been using it for very long.

Check out Switcher for Vista, freeware similar to Expose: http://insentient.net/

I was having a few pains with Vista and my laptop just felt sluggish, I installed SP1 last night and my laptop feels a lot more responsive now. The improvement to accelerated graphics is amazing, flip 3d and switcher are now incredibly fast. Hopefully the desktop will go just a smoothly.

Here you go, expose and dock for vista, enjoy: http://insentient.net/

There's already a great exposé clone available at http://insentient.net/