My thoughts exactly. Who doesn’t use minimize and maximize?
The virtual desktop mimics your real desktop as a way to relate to real life activities and organization. But you can do things on a virtual desktop you can’t do in real life but would love to be able to. I can’t minimize my spiral notebook, so I have to put it in a drawer or lay something on top of it. If I could just minimize it temporarily and with a flick and a click get it back, I’d love to do that. Wouldn’t you?
Not sure. I suppose shrinking my pile of notebooks would help. Minimize on the screen never attracted me, but others are free to use it of course.
What I need on my real desktop is a daemon to remove the clutter and tidy up after the cat.
Minimize is probably like put it on microfiche… thats dated.
I have found that the use of virtual workspaces is more usable than minimizing. With the help of a couple of nice ItsFoss folks, I’ve figured out how to do virtual desktops in KDE as well as in the panels of MATE, LXDE, and XFCE. I don’t know if Gnome3 has a way, but I don’t use it anyway. Right now I’m driving Xubuntu, Kubuntu, Linux Lite, and Peppermint (Debian) and all have four virtual desktops in the bottom (or top) panel.
It is nice to hear I am not the only one.
You’re not. While I don’t purposefully avoid minimizing a window, I usually just click the icon for the window I want to switch to. I seldom have more than four or five applications running at any given time so this works well for me.
Ernie
@nevj I do and cinnamon has “saved sessions” but I thought that only pertained to open apps/windows, placement, etc. I did not think it would save what I was currently typing in CLI in terminal and I also thought using the up/down arrows in terminal only show completed commands.
Unless you “Save As” I did not think I could get back to the display I previously had where I had been running a bunch of commands with their output that I needed to see.
Sometimes I am following manpages to follow instructions in terminal and am only partway finished when, if something were to happen and computer rebooted (God forbid), I would have lost all of that work in terminal.
I’ll look into what exactly is saved in the cinnamon saved sessions.
Thanks,
Sheila
I’m not usually in the habit of minimizing windows either, but since I couldn’t click icons on my panel for windows that were covered up to bring them to the top, I used minimize to get to them, although I probably should have dragged everything else out of the way to get to the one I wanted. That just didn’t occur to me at the time (hindsight’s 20/20 ‘ain’t’ it? 
). Now that I’ve learned about putting the task manager widget back on my panel, all those troubles are gone so I’m no longer inclined to minimize a window to get to one that’s covered up underneath it ,
Ernie
I’m using Gnome 4.x on three machines, one Pop!_OS 22.04 desktop, one Ubuntu 23.10 ThinkPad, one Ubuntu 23.04 on a Raspberry Pi4 - I HAVE Close Minimize and Maximize ( X _ and ) on nearly ALL of my application windows. I don’t know where you got your information from…
e.g. Sayonara player on Pop!_OS :
I always move them over to the left (in Gnome using Gnome Tweaks) and apply a MacOS like theme - some apps ignore my them so that Brave looks like this :
And MS Edge desperately trying to do it’s own “thang” on Linux
(I’m guessing nobody at Microsoft thought to see what happens when they try to render the tab stacking / grouping button with window control widgets on the left [doesn’t do this on MacOS]).
Lots of sources, but ItsFOSS posted a way to get them back:
Unlike Ubuntu, distributions like Fedora and Arch Linux give you
vanilla GNOME and one thing that may bother you is the lack of
minimize and maximize buttons on the application windows.
GNOME expects you to use the application switcher (Alt+Tab) or
utilize the activities area (Super key) to just switch between
running applications, instead of minimizing it.
I don’t remember when I first experienced it, but maybe your Gnome Tweaks gave it back to you.
Sheila
You are right. It will not do that. I wish it did. I am sure something I used in the past did save your CLI activity? It does preserve your command history, but not the current line.
It will save the tabs in a browser.
It is not meant to rescue you from a powerout… just a normal shutdown
With editors like vi you can recover the session lost in a hangup,or a power failure, because they keep a temporary file.
I don’t know where @abhishek got this information from but it’s wrong :
I’m running MacOS Sonoma (14) on my MBP, but it started off with Big Sur MacOS 11 when I bought it - and through EVERY version of MacOS just about EVERY application has Close, Minimize and Maximize (on the left, where they should always be! 
Maximize in MacOS is different behaviour than on X11 / Wayland or Windows - it makes the app full screen in a virtual desktop and hides the application title bar - you swipe horizontally to switch worspaces - I’d use workspaces on Linux if they worked as well as they do on MacOS). I’ve sporadically used OS X through most of the big cat named versions, to El Capitan and up to Catalina - CNM buttons on the left on nearly ALL applications (e.g. The “Finder”) on ALL iterations of OS X and MacOS… Unless Abishek was referring to “classic” MacOS like System6 and System7 from the 80s and 80s et cetera (but those placed window controls on the right).
Admittedly - I do have options to enable (or disable) Minimize and Maximize buttons in Gnome Tweaks in Pop!_OS - but I’m pretty sure “enabled” is the default in Pop!_OS and Ubuntu 23.04 anyway.
hmm… probably… the left side control thing was copied in the Ubuntu some years back.
I haven’t used macOS for years. I think I saw someone else using it and thought that there was no minimize option there.
If you are using macOS and the minimize/maximize buttons are there, then please disregard my statement 
Though, GNOME tends to get inspired by macOS (not that’s a feeling, not a fact) 