Because it takes up less real estate and I know what app I’m looking for. I don’t have separate windows for all my Firefox tabs even though you could consider them to belong to 5 or 6 different categories.
Why not let the application decide, like with browser tabs?
I absolutely hate it that the default for Gnome is to group all windows of the same application together under the same icon. When I have multiple terminals open, then they are in no way related. I want a specific one. Like writing code in an editor and a terminal for running the application or compiling, and then another one for some shell access.
> Why not let the application decide, like with browser tabs?
That means you need to wait for each application to add support for it whereas here it is the window manager.
What you want it seems is to group the windows by workflow. You can do what. Use a different desktop per workflow. I have 1 main 2 reference 3 utilities Then set your task bar to only show windows from the current desktop.
Gnome is also incredibly slow to allow one to select a particular window when Alt-Tabbing. It is a one second delay every time you want to change window.
A nice solution is to simply put each icon/task of the same application side by side, so for instance you get 3 firefox icons in a row in the taskbar/dock, that's what I do, there's enough space anyway. That way you can quickly tell what's open and switch to them.
For me mentally, it makes more sense that all windows of the same application are grouped. In your example, when I want to focus the PDF file, I first look for the icon of my PDF viewer and I don't want there to be three icons; I want just one icon and if I (right)click it get a list in which I see the window titles.
Could you give an argument for why someone would want it?