Who uses 256 workspaces?!

[Legendary_Bibo]

I just messed with the workspaces thing to see how it affected my compiz sphere and I just realized you could have a max of 256 workspaces. Who the hell uses so many?

[dragos240]

For the lulz? If you want that many, you can have that many.

[blithen]

You could put a picture on each one and have a fancy compiz effect switch to them, kind of like a slideshow. And as dragos said, if you want that many you have that many.

[JK3mp]

I bet aliens use that many... =P

[Dustin2128]

I bet aliens use that many... =P
Indeed, I do.

[steveneddy]

I bet aliens use that many... =P

No we don't.

[Lucradia]

255 is the end of two digit hex, so I believe 256 may have been chosen because the code doesn't know how to re-repeat after 256.

Or maybe start of 16-bit?

[earthpigg]

256 is a pretty commonly encountered number in computers.

2^8, to be specific. 2^10 is 1kb, 2^20 is 1mb, and so on.

the limit probably just happened to work out there because that number coincedentally relied upon some other number that was 2^8, and the developers saw no reason to place an artificial limit.

"if it takes us zero work for the limit to be 256, why do additional work to decrease that limit and potentially introduce new bugs?"

[The Real Dave]

Orginally, each workspace used another 1MB of RAM. The creator when testing had but 257MB of free RAM and swap, and therefore, set it to 256 for stability reasons.

[Phrea]

Orginally, each workspace used another 1MB of RAM. The creator when testing had but 257MB of free RAM and swap, and therefore, set it to 256 for stability reasons.

:lolflag:

[chriswyatt]

I bet Linus uses 256 workspaces simultaneously.

[whiskeylover]

Chuck Norris uses 257

[MaxIBoy]

Old-time hacker Joseph M. Newcomer advises that whenever choosing a quantifiable but arbitrary restriction, you should make it either a power of 2 or a power of 2 minus 1. If you impose a limit of 107 items in a list, everyone will know it is a random number — on the other hand, a limit of 15 or 16 suggests some deep reason (involving 0- or 1-based indexing in binary) and you will get less flamage (http://www.catb.org/%7Eesr/jargon/html/F/flamage.html) for it. Limits which are round numbers in base 10 are always especially suspect.
Source: http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/R/restriction.html