Being a power user does not make you infaillible or unable to press the wrong keys. A subtle animation is a trivial visual cue that they keys I pressed did something, the wrong keys resulting in the wrong cue. I am not looking at my keyboard when I switch desktops.

Look at tools, for example. Tools for power users do not have fewer cues and affordances than tools for neophytes. They have more, because they have more features, more power, and using them can be more dangerous. You can also see it that way: a newbie using a feature once a day will be wrong (and needing to be nudged to the right direction) once a day. A power user who is wrong 1 times every 100 they use a feature will still be wrong more often than the newbie if they use it more than 100 times a day.

Also, this:

> We’ve turned off the animation when switching Desktops using the keyboard shortcuts as it was leading to flashes and hangs

is fucking ridiculous. If your compositor is so bad you can’t animate desktop switching without “flashes and hangs”, it means you have some serious work to do on your display subsystem. Fix your OS already!

https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2021/08/05/announc...

Maybe I just have exceptional cognitive and motor skills issues, but even though I spend pretty much all my time in front of a screen and consider myself to be a power user, I press wrong keys by mistake very often, and I do appreciate (fast) animations for feedback. There definitely should be at the very least a toggle though.

There should be some feedback to something so drastic as a desktop context change

When going "two to the right" over empty desktops it is nice to see it was triggered two times maybe? I have a habit of putting the same stuff on the same virtual desktop number, so the other are ofen empty.

Hum... Do I have an absolute shortcut to go to virtual desktop X, or only a relative one to go to the previous or next one?

On the first case animations aren't important, but on the second they are essential.