Virtual desktop question.

xiantianhan

Honorable
Jun 8, 2015
14
0
10,510
So after playing around the W10's virtual/multiple desktops for a while, I have realised two things (unless I'm missing something of course) that are kinda bumming me out:
1. Each desktop can't have it's own background.
2. You also can't customize each desktop so they have their own sets of icons/apps/programs in their taskbars/desktop area.

So, my question is this...what's the point? If I can't customize each desktop so it looks independent from the others, then what is the actual point in having multiple desktops? Again, I'm almost certain I'm missing something here, but if I'm not this is one of the most useless features of W10 IMO.
 
Solution
More for separation of things, I think. Catered towards multi-taskers probably. It's effective in terms of keeping things a bit cleaner. Lets you work on different things without getting them all jumbled. It has its uses, but like all things, it won't be useful to everybody. Probably more useful for people running a single monitor; I find little use for it as a with two monitors, but I can see how it would be effective for productivity-related tasks, or if you have multiple people using the device.

Microsoft's notes on its design choices with this: https://blogs.windows.com/bloggingwindows/2015/04/16/virtual-desktops-in-windows-10-the-power-of-windowsmultiplied/

Titillating

Expert
Ambassador
More for separation of things, I think. Catered towards multi-taskers probably. It's effective in terms of keeping things a bit cleaner. Lets you work on different things without getting them all jumbled. It has its uses, but like all things, it won't be useful to everybody. Probably more useful for people running a single monitor; I find little use for it as a with two monitors, but I can see how it would be effective for productivity-related tasks, or if you have multiple people using the device.

Microsoft's notes on its design choices with this: https://blogs.windows.com/bloggingwindows/2015/04/16/virtual-desktops-in-windows-10-the-power-of-windowsmultiplied/
 
Solution

Asenath

Reputable
Nov 24, 2015
2
0
4,510
Go easy on me... I'm not sure exactly where this post belongs - it's my first post, and I'm basically exploring my possibilities before I go picking up hardware. I'd like to pick up an off-lease dell/hp to do the following:

-File server (had in mind to do ZFS with 4x 3TB drives), regular file duties, backups, music serving to squeezeboxes, and possibly serving media to entertainment center.
-virtualizing some desktops (one client PC, a laptop usually run wirelessly, possibly out to an ipad if I really felt ambitious enough to try virtualizing to it). I'd like to be able to virtualize MacOS, a linux OS (probably just Ubuntu) and Windows7/10. At least all of those available to the PC, maybe the laptop, not so sure on the ipad.

For fileserving with ZFS - can I run esxi and do ZFS? It seems like many folks are running ZFS (like freenas or other) as a VM over esxi. And lots of opposition to doing this as well. I need the virtualized desktops to be able to access the fileserver's storage. Is it possible to have the virtualized desktops play nice with each other?

Since this will be running headless, I obviously need the PC to be able to connect to the IPMI of the server. I doubt that would be much of an issue, but I thought I should keep that in mind.

Looking for guidance, suggestions on hardware software hypervisors, etc.

Any hardware I would pick up would be minimum 24GB, but possibly more. I could conceivably put 48GB and dual xeons together with vt-d in one of these offlease servers pretty easily. http://goo.gl/LYLHhG | http://goo.gl/Ksdrqj