Wide monitor experience is worse than multi-monitor experience
Context
About a year ago, when I decided to upgrade my monitor, I decided to get a double-wide monitor instead of two smaller monitors. My thought process was that this would be more convenient than having two monitors, but under GNOME, this has been consistently worse than if I had two monitors. This monitor even supports a "dual input" mode where both halves of the monitor can come from separate inputs, and I have refused to plug my desktop into the monitor twice out of principle, although I cannot deny that my experience using GNOME would be better if I did.
Positives
- Being able to hold shift to "snap" windows together when resizing allows possible but painful tiling of windows.
- Uhhh, that's about it.
Negatives
- The "quick tiling" only supports two columns of windows, meaning that while a double-monitor setup can support four windows, my single-monitor setup can only support two.
- The top bar always shows up unless a window is fullscreen, and will always draw over windows. If I decide to have a "screen size" window on the left half of the screen, e.g. for a game, then either the top of the game window will be cut off by the top bar, or the bottom will be below the screen. I was using an extension to hide the top bar in these cases before GNOME 45, but that's still a terrible solution.
- The top bar always takes up the full width of the screen and cannot be configured to, for example, only cover part of the screen, to resolve cases like the above. This covers cases where the "hide top bar" extension would work; it would be more ideal if I could simply move the top bar to only one half of the screen, instead of having to hide the whole thing.
Solutions
- The "quick tiling" should support more than one column, and potentially even multiple rows as well. At least parity with multi-monitor setups would be nice, and thus something like four columns for a double-wide monitor and three for an ultrawide monitor would be fine, although once this is no longer hard-coded to 2, I would like to see it become configurable at least as a tweak setting.
- Relative to those tiling columns, you should be able to shorten the top bar so that it only covers some of those columns, similar to how it would look on a multi-monitor setup. I understand that a fully moveable top bar would be too much (even though it was possible in GNOME 2…) but something limited in this sense would be nice.
- Maybe windows drawing over the top bar could be enabled as a tweak setting, as a workaround.
Summary
I present this in terms of user experience because I understand that GNOME's direction is heavily directed by its design motives, and that regardless of the solution, at least these pain points should be addressed. I wouldn't mind making separate issues for the individual sub-points, but I figured that at least starting here would be a good idea.