back in plasma 5, this used to be the default behavior.
but now, it seems to keep a different virtual desktop selected per activity. for my use case this is very undesirable.
IE, if i am on virtual desktop 1 on activity A, if i switch to activity B i should remain on virtual desktop 1 rather than whatever i was last on in activity B
according the the help page, an option apparently exists. but i can find no such thing in the settings anywhere.
Remove the VirtualDesktop switching setting, which was already
getting dropped from KActivitiesManagerD.
The original “remember virtual desktop” function was created in 2012 without a configuration option - it was “the right thing”. The functionality was a bit later moved to a plugin and the configuration for that was simply enabling or disabling the plugin - the UI was just triggering that configuration.
As part of Plasma 6, and the change of the configuration panel to use the D-Bus API instead of directly updating configuration file (which was the reason the old setting required a restart - to re-read the configuration file), that configuration option was no longer exposed.
But the option is still in the configuration file, and you can go and change it yourself - this is one of those rare “we don’t think showing the configuration option makes sense, but we won’t remove the functionality” things that sometimes happen even in KDE.
To disable the “virtual desktop switching” Activity Manager plugin, open the file ~/.config/kactivitymanagerdrc in a text editor, locate the line that has
I can confirm that this fix doesn’t work for me. My kactivitymanagerdrc file was empty, adding these lines and changing it to false had no effect. On Kubuntu 24.10, Plasma 6.1.5, Frameworks 6.6.0, Qt 6.6.2
I checked that updating kactivitymanagerdrc worked for me - quite a while ago, and from looking at the source code for Plasma 5, by 5.27 the code that consults that configuration no longer exists.
The first commit’s message says “remember the virtual desktop per activity” the second commit’s message says “don’t remember virtual desktops when intentionally switching to a different one”.
I haven’t looked through all comments on the PR. Can you point me to the one that explains that?
The idea is that to solve bug #427579, when switching to the activity with the attention demanding window - you’d go directly to that application regardless of what kwin’s memory is about that activity. If you’d also look at the code - if the target window is in multiple desktops, it will go to the first regardless of what makes sense - I can already see the future bug report: “app is on VD 1 and 3 on activity A, I was on VD 3 in activity A, switched to activity B and now when app demands attention - activating it takes me to VD 1 instead of 3”. But that is for the future (also, I never use the “window on multiple, but not all, VDs” feature, so I don’t actually care).
I’m removing [the option to disable remembering] in preparation to make each activity have it’s own unique set of virtual desktops […]. When this happens, (and one VD is never in multiple activities), having this option won’t make any sense.
Replace 1833c4e9-5382-4e3c-a28b-dc3d26315a27 with your activity ID from ~/.config/kactivitymanagerdrc
I’ve just updated to Debian Trixie, so I will be using Plasma 6.3 for the next two years, and I can’t believe I still need to write shell scripts to use the desktop. But at least bug 455429 was fixed in this release, so that’s an improvement.
Instead of writing script that the user needs to remember to invoke - instead of using the standard activity switching keys/UI - how about monitoring for regular activity switches and “fixing the current VD” after Plasma used its internal mechanism to switch?
For reference - see my script here that does something else by monitoring the activity switcher, but you can get everything you need there.
