The problem is especially chronic, for example, when I'm working on some web development stuff. Sure, toggling between two windows is dead simple, but when you have to switch to some other task, you're left with no choice but to go window-hunting. For so fundamental an operation as switching applications, which users perform many hundreds of times a day, making them tediously scan a (constantly-changing) list sorted by recently-used order seems like an awful idea to me, in many cases. The thing that's always ticked me off about the standard desktop metaphor is the inefficiency of Alt+Tab (at any point of time, you cannot be sure of where a particular application is, in the most-recently-used order). But you can still use it for things like your browser, which only runs a single instance. If you like having separate windows inside every program and hate tabbed interfaces, this won't work so well. Zathura PDF viewer + Tabbed, SpaceFM), so this method works flawlessly for me. NOTE: I mostly use single application instances with tabbed UIs or similar ( Firefox, Emacs + escreen.el, Terminator,

Alt tab terminator