Description
Problem to solve
Filters: The dashboard redesign back in #3426 split the workspaces list into Active & All. The split was introduced to help educate users about the ephemeral nature of workspaces as users kept coming back to restart stopped workspaces that contained obsolete code. See also Gitpod's Product Vision and relevant blog post. 🌀
Garbage Collection: Regardless this split, users still find it difficult to keep in mind the active garbage collection that automatically deletes unpinned workspaces that have been stopped for more than 14 days, even if with the new non-dismissible alert on the top of the stopped workspaces list. ♻️
Pinning: Thus, pinning workspaces became more like a habit users fallback to maintain a peace of mind. ✌️
Besides all the above, we're still receiving a lot of requests from users to restore auto-deleted workspaces, and more.
Proposal
Things we could try in smaller iterations as MVC (minimum viable changes) or altogether in one step:
- Keep all workspaces with pending changes in the Active workspaces list. Potentially auto-pin to avoid confusion.
- Never garbage collect any workspace with pending changes.
- Remove the pinning functionality altogether.