It’s funny how we’ve come full circle. Years ago, we were glad to have windowed programming environments. I can remember lusting after a Lisa and a Macintosh the moment I read about one. I even tried to design my own GEM-like interface on the Atari 800. Windowed environments are absolutely fantastic, but, there is a certain bit of focus that having a full screen Wordperfect or Pine session in full screen can lend you. The distractions are minimized almost completely. There’s no “You have mail” icons jumping around. It’s just you, and the program you’re working with. I know I’ve had days where I’ll just move to a virtual console with vi and sit and edit. It’s great for keeping my focus away from all of the bouncing balls that steal a little of my focus.
Unfortunately, this quest for “full screen mode” has gotten a little ridiculous. There’s several programs out there that are busy trying to reinvent the full-screen text editor. Mark Pilgrim has an interesting take on one of them: WrongRoom [dive into mark]. His major complaint is that these projects start simple (I mean, really, how hard is it to write a text editor) and end up blowing up into major, MAJOR projects (I mean, really, it’s hard to write a good text editor).
The problem isn’t with trying to remove distractions (Merlin Mann has an excellent Mac Break Weekly called The Distracted Mac which shows how to make your Macintosh a very boring, and focused place to work). Removing distractions is very powerful. What the problem is is starting over from scratch and neglectng the hard work that it takes to get something working properly. If you’re committed to making that sacrifice, be my guest. (KDE and GNOME come to mind when I couldn’t possibly think why anyone would mimick CDE). But, just be aware that what may seem awesomely simple at first may turn out to be what you’re working on for the next 3 years.
Until then, I’m using Ctrl-Alt-F1 to minimize my distractions. 
I’m perfectly content to have my applications all on the same desktop. I run xload and xclock, and keep them visible. Any spare desktop shows a new astronomy image every hour.
And yet, for the most part, I don’t have mail, etc., interupting me. I’ve killed Nautilus. Having it pop up a mouse focus grabbing window saying that it is searching my disks is a total non-starter. What was the point of that?
There are a couple apps that run full screen. UT2004, for example. It makes me feel out of control. Can’t even rip a CD while it’s running. Feh.
And why would you want to rip a CD while UT2004 is running? It’s already trying to use up all of the CPU.
And focus for me is more than Focus Follows Mouse. More like focus follows… what was I saying?
And if I had a dual core, or quad core, I’d want to rip CDs.
And yes, I understood…
… whoa – bright! shiney!
… uhm whatever it was, and it just isn’t an issue for me. I’m a multi-tasking maniac. That’s my point, and i’m sticking to it.
These days, the CD player could do the ripping, retries, etc., and just send data to the host. The host could use DMA for data transfer everywhere, freeing up the CPU for UT2004 even during backups. Oh. That’s right. I never did write SKUMOS, so we’re stuck with CPU involvment in IO.
So, who wants to help me write SKUMOS? It’s just an operating system. Should be able to kick it out in a few months/years/decades. All the hard work has already been done, and can be freely stolen.