Make one system - Virtual Desktop or Activities

Brainstorm
41

I did some investigation to see what seems to be the case right now with activities:

  1. I cannot set different settings for notifications per activity (at least it isn’t obvious that this is happening)
  2. I cannot change font sizes for one activity, without changing the font sizes for everything.
  3. I can change the desktop, wallpaper, and widgets
  4. There isn’t a clear way to customize krunner results based on activity.
1 Like
42
  1. you can’t have different virtual desktop arrangements
  2. you can’t have different window tiling arrangements.
43

Maybe we should do a kickstarter to finance future work and improvements to Activities, since it’s a cool feature with a lot of potential.

44
  1. You can’t have different panels per Activity.

I can’t quickly find reference to it, but at least in the past, this was purposefully removed as a feature - back in the KDE 4 era for sure, and a mention from a Plasma dev somewhere somewhat recently that this wasn’t going to happen.

I can understand why – using Latte for the purpose made the plasma-org.kde.plasma.desktop-appletsrc file quite messy or cumbersome, I think.

But I still want the feature :laughing:

45

There is a section for it : Sponsored Work - KDE Discuss

Big problem is to have a vision and that is KDE is lacking since the era of Plasma 5. KDE4 was buggy but had a vision.

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46

Can we do without a vision, but with a clear and documented discussion on the improvement of the Activity feature? But I’m sure someone already attempted that.
I suppose the vision comes for the most part from KDE goals.

1 Like
47

After carefully reading all peoples use cases and concerns, I don’t see there being just one (Activities or Virtual Desktops from my first post).

I am all for a separate .config for each Activity with would allow for a multitude of interesting setups. This would need a Activity manager for copy / clone / delete / new (based on default) as described above.

48

Cool! So a crowdfunding could be organized in that section?

49

Yes but who decide what is an improvement or not ?

50

You can try and see how people respond.

51

That’s why a big discussion on the matter takes place: to choose criterias, priorities, etcetera. But it seems like someone tried it, because I read lots of posts like this one. Maybe it has not been done with the proper effort or organization.

52

I guess the question that I have is what is needed by the people doing the approvals ultimately to merge the code (e.g. acceptance criteria). It seems to me we want a way to:

  1. a period of time where we collect use cases (maybe a 2 weeks/ 1month), followed by some ranked choice voting on priorities to help people volunteering to work on things decide what is most useful (another 2 weeks/month) – this won’t dictate what gets worked on, but for may help people decide. We also probably should get separate votes/feedback if any specific feature is inconsistent with KDE maintainers’ vision of what these features should be and interact with the rest of KDE. We shouldn’t assume that the current KDE devs will do the ultimate implementations (they have other awesome things they are working on), so getting some buy-off will be key.
  2. After we have some general idea that the features are well aligned, proposal(s) what the feature would look like and how interactions would work (e.g. mockups). My personal experience is that this can be much more lightweight than full code implementations, and can provide early feedback on implementation which is useful in larger coordinated features.
  3. After that we start implementations.
53

Maybe because there are not enough people using it so no one really care about it. That’s why I agree that it should be included to the overview.

54

I think adding it to the overview would help people get in touch with the feature. It could also confuse people who do not have any use for activities. But a discussion on the feature itself would be somewhere else even without this addition.

55

I would love to keep activities, but have them enhanced.

My current workflow:

  • Misc Surfing etc, just different Firefox Windows + sometimes Steam/Lutris etc
  • Own Projects (with Folder Widgets for some Folders + marked Files + a note Widget)
  • Clients, basically the same setup as for these projects, with different folders of course

Some apps, like keepassx, enpass, qownnotes are either shown everywhere or minimized in the task bar. On note heavy days, qownnotes is always maximized on virtual deskop 1 on all activities.

What I’m really missing, is a proper session restore.

Firefox is not an kde app, I know there are hacks with different profiles or windows rules + an extension that adds a custom string to the window name… Will probably set up something like this.

But even kde apps all restore on activity 1 + workspace one.
I loose 10+ Minutes at every reboot, to rearrange everything.

This is my main pain point. It would be the most perfect work experience ever with this feature. Currently looking into ways to contribute, this here is the first thread I found.

1 Like
56

I wanted to ask you more details about how to do this (running separate profiles for each activities), but then I cam across this: Matija Šuklje / Activity-aware Firefox · GitLab, which seems to be doing what you;re looking for. I have to say it works fantastically it is saving me SO MUCH pain (not having a separate profile per activity is a real mess in Plasma 6 without the session restore).

I would highly recommend it to anyone wanted to do more with activities :slight_smile:

On Fedora I have noticed a few quirks noted here: This script amazing, THANK YOU!!! Here are a few quirks with workarounds (#15) · Issues · Matija Šuklje / Activity-aware Firefox · GitLab. There are workaround for all of them.

2 Likes
57

As this thread has calmed down a bit, and the initial shock is over with the original post and title, I think having completely different setups per activity is the way forward.

I suggest the following after reading all the comments from my original post.

  1. Everyone has one activity when first installing / using KDE Plasma
  2. The activity is very customisable with everything you expect within the Plasma experience - with multiple virtual desktops (including different wallpapers per desktop :wink:).
  3. Then having Activities as the top dog / boss which can create a completely new experience per activity.
  4. All three of the above + maybe a different .config per activity (this is implementation allowing).

That’s it from my side, and I am very impressed with the way these discussions go in the KDE community. On the wider Internet it’s very wild !

2 Likes
58

This sounds amazing! Great find! :+1:

59

Why not moving on proposing this mockup, with the ability to just hide the “activities” part?
To me it seems like it would give the proper attention to activities.

61

I agree, some users won’t be interested in using activities and should have the option of having a ‘clean’ overview by turning activities off in the settings.

I’ll add a mock-up for settings. Where do you suggest that I make the proposal. Here or somewhere else?