I don't see how that's "simpler". That's one of those things that's only "intuitive" once you're used to it. I for one would find that disorienting.

I personally originally thought (before looking at N900 videos, back when I was first finding out about it), that it worked like so:

1 2 3 | 1 2
4 5 6 | 3 4
7 8 9 |

For 9 desktops and 4 desktops respectively. I also thought that there was up and down scrolling, not just left-right scrolling. Diagonal is not necessary, because as the prior diagonal scrolling suggestion shows that that introduces a desktop-tiling complexity that's unwarranted.

The thing is, with just the option of "linear" (as it currently is) and "rectangle" (as this discussion keeps chatting about), you can easily have normal scrolling without any of this fancy crap.

Just up/down takes you down/up a row (looping around at the ends, so from 1 up you go to 7), and right-left moves right to left as normal. You could also make a settings option where side scrolling from 3 to the right would take you to 4 instead of looping you to one, and vice versa, while keeping the up-down stuff going on a shift-rows basis.

The problem is, I think people are forgetting that this isn't exactly easy to just insert into existing code just because it's easy to logic-out.

Also, what is the point of having "screenshots" of each desktop if you're going the desktop-switcher route? The N900 handles multiple windows updating just fine, as can be seen in the task manager when you're switching between windows. No point in freezing a screenshot (and constantly writing a new image to disk) when the N900 can easily handle the viewing of multiple windows - not to mention the fact that that way you can see if some widget updates on your other desktops from the desktop switcher (just as you can from the task switcher for running programs currently), instead of just having to see a screenshot of your desktop as it looked when you last visited it.