alt Hacker NewsRight right, and I'm not saying users shouldn't be able to have a floating window with video (or whatever) in it. I'm saying it shouldn't be Chrome making that window floating and always visible.
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porridgeraisin • yesterday at 7:01 PM
I don't get it, if you're on google meet, and you want to make one of many videos PiP. How can you ever do that in the window manager? It has to be done in the application! You right click or click on the menu on that particular video, and click Picture in picture.
How the heck can the window manager do it?
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That expectation is really an immediate major UX defect. Most really good GUIs rely on tons and tons of subtle behaviors to work right (that is, to assist the user). That means - counterintuitively - that they need a lot of leeway in how they get to control their own windows to appear on the screen.
Ultimately, the screen is just an unbroken flat surface and windows are just a software level abstraction that has been tortured beyond hope and one that users shouldn't have to micromanage or understand deeply.
If an application needs something to appear at a specific spot in a specific way, the display manager needs to bend over backwards to make it happen or it's broken. Windows understands it. MacOS understands it. X11 understand it, but the community is working hard to throw that wisdom away.