I’m unsure that I can provide any particularly useful feedback as I’ve been using Ubuntu Budgie for maybe three months and I only started using Shuffler yesterday. What I can provide however–and have been meaning to since I began using Ubuntu Budgie–is praise of those of you working on this distro (which of course includes the Shuffler functionality). It took some doing to convince myself to finally make the jump from Mint/MATE–a decision made a bit easier by my Sony laptop which suddenly quit working–but am I glad that I did. Having been using Linux for a decade I’ve never installed a distro quite as satisfying this one. It’s built on Ubuntu; is seamlessly functional, stable, configurable, attractive… IMO, it has it all.
As for Shuffler itself, what a damn fine piece of software!.. For three months I’ve been having my system auto-load apps and then manually arranging them. Yesterday, I decided to look into using shuffler and thanks to its excellent functionality, now my work arranging windows when I log into my system is greatly reduced.
These new Shuffler features represent the kind of functionality that I highly value. Like most people, I’m project oriented and it sounds like the new changes will more or less enable the ability to manage “projects” from a window placement perspective (which thus far I’ve only seen implemented–though not necessarily comprehensively–via Compiz). Kudos to the dev team here for valuing workflow efficiency as seems to be evident in Ubuntu Budgie overall. This distro is clearly built for getting work accomplished and not just surfing the web and playing games.
My general workflow is based on arranging particular windows on each of my four workspaces. Instances of the text editor, the file manager and Tilix are all arranged on workspace 1. Workspace 2 is dedicated to internet apps such as the web browser (Palemoon), usually running full-screen. Workspace 3 is for additional utilities. For example, here I keep an app running called “LAN Messenger” that allows me to easily communicate and share files with others in our household without going out over the Internet. I also keep the system monitor app running here as I only have 4GB of memory on my system (soon to be 16GB). Workspace 4 is project oriented and depends on what I’m presently working on. As I’m often engaged in creative work of one form or another, this workspace may have LibreOffice Writer open, a video editor such as Shotcut or a “single-pane” outliner application that I developed for keeping notes. So that’s more or less how I currently use my system. With the proposed changes to shuffler, I imagine that my third and fourth workspaces might be preconfigured according to the “project” that I’m currently working on, which would be great.
Again, you folks here have done a tremendous job on Ubuntu Budgie and I just wanted to provide a bit of general feedback in addition to responding specifically re. Shuffler.