Comment 8 for bug 656441

History of the decision:

Unity as we understood it was originally supposed to be a 2x2 desktop grid. The point of the workspace switcher was support this feature. Using the workspace switcher with only a single workspace is suboptimal, providing an awkward "global expose" like experience that it was neither designed for or works all that well for. It provides a seemingly useless drag and drop experience that always results in a seemingly random shuffling of windows.

Expanding to a 2x2 grid however reveals the reasons for the zoom out, why the wallpaper is zoomed out, and why you can drag and drop windows (so you may drag and drop between desktops).

There were technical issues respecting the users current desktop layout in Unity, largely due to everyone having much better things to do. Towards the end of the cycle the issue of defaulting to a single desktop was still not resolved, and even users having a 4 desktops had an awkward situation of the keybindings matching a 4x1 while the workspace switcher showed a 2x2. This resulted in a very confusing desktop switching experience, where the visual model did not match the logical model.

To fix these issues at first code was written to create a 2x2 grid and more or less hardcode unity to always do this. The user simply could not change the number of workspaces Unity provided, and this was considered evil but less evil than simply not having workspaces. Then the code was updated to respect the number of workspaces a user had and configure the pager system properly. This also worked well but by now Unity was shipping with the gconf key defaulted to 1. So either we force the user to have a minimum number of desktops, or we accept that users will only have a single desktop. Gconf is not considered a very user friendly way to change the number of desktops.

The choice was made to force a minimum number of desktops (2x2) over giving all of our users a single desktop. Should someone ask me to reverse this decision, it is a simple if statement that must be deleted.

There are really 3 logical ways forward

1) Keep it as it is
2) Remove the limitation
3) Remove the limitation and change the default number of workspace to 4

Personally I prefer option number 3.