I’ve been trying to figure this out for a few days and I’ve done everything I can to avoid having to bother people on a forum for answers but I’m completely lost.
I have been using linux on my laptop for a few weeks now and recently switched to KDE Plasma. A few days ago I discovered the activities feature and began to set up different activities to keep things organized. I immediately noticed that if I linked and application to the desktop it would mirror that action on every other activity.
I noticed that once I have linked something to the desktop I can ‘right-click>Activities>Link to current activity’ however this seems to have no effect at all and it is still linked to all activities.
Is there any way to have different desktop shortcuts for each activity?
linking to activities does not seem to do what is expected (or anything at all, for that matter)
using folder view for the desktop, i’ve tired setting up 3 activities and each new activity copies over all the desktop icons and panels, but not widgets placed on the desktop like the trash can.
now if i go to each activity and choose link or unlink such that only one activity is “linked” and the other two are unlinked… the icon will still show (and function) on all three activities.
nor does the options in the context menu seem alter or update based on what is linked or unlinked so there is no feedback of any kind as to what this feature is doing.
this experiment was all done using the default setting shown here
i don’t know if that would make a difference if enabled.
Edit: after reboot the context menu for all three activities has changed to reflect the “linked” status for the icon, but it still shows (and functions) in all three
so it seems a restart or at least a relog is required update the context menus.
i suspected… i did note that the context menus for the activities linking changed only after a restart so does seem to be some feedback (eventually) for linking an unlinking.
but it still doesn’t have any affect on if the icon shows up or not in a given activity, which is what i would expect “linking” do
Is there a solution for this? I’ve created an activity and linked five folders in the desktop. After rebooting, the five icons showed up in every desktop…
I’m also new to this, I tried deleting the shortcut on each activity which appears to work at first but doesn’t survive when you update any of the other activities (all activities show the same icons).
A possible workaround is the desktop folder widget.
For example to keep games off of the other Activities I can put all my games in a hidden folder and then used that widget on a games Activity.
The first thing I do on Plasma is to change the desktop from showing the ~/Desktop folder to whatever that other mode is called. That might be enough to fix the original issue.
I know I did not explain it well. Will come back to this later today, am not near my laptop right now.
but if you do that only plasmoids will appear on the desktop, no icons or shortcuts can be placed there and there is no way to scale, arrange or sort them other than manually.
you can place a plasmoid that appears like an icon for an individual file or app tho, so that’s at least something.
also i notice when you switch from one to the other, then back the plasmoids all get moved to the upper left corner completely undoing any manual placement you may have done, where with actual icons they come back in the same place as where you left them.
For files, I tend to have a Folder View plasmoid on each Activity and set it to show only files amd folders that belong to the active Activity. Then I associate files and folders with that Activity.
As for arranging it manually, I don’t mind, actually prefer it. Applications I tend to prefer pinning them per Activity to the launch menu (or the taskbar).
all plasmoids are activity specific by default (except panels which follow you to each activity) and by using desktop view you can only manually scale or place plasmoids using the edit mode.
icons/links can only be placed on the desktop in folder view, but they can be associated with a specific activity and they can be sorted and positioned using the icons tab in the configure desktop dialog.
in the configure desktop dialog, under the locations tab, you can specify to show files linked to the current activity and those files/links will appear only on those activities (sans the link icon superimposed)
only these icon/links (sans the link icon superimposed) do not seem to respond to manual sorting for some reason, but they do sort and arrange.
