Multiple profiles for single user

Brainstorm
,
1

Hello everybody,

At first I would like to greet everyone and as I am new in here I hope I won’t make any mistakes against forum rules with this post.

I would like to share with you my idea for some new feature in KDE, which I think cannot be achieved right now (if I am mistaken, please let me know) and which maybe someone else will find interesting, thus I would like to put it into some brainstorming.

I will describe it briefly: as a user I would like to be able to log-in into my KDE session with different settings profiles.

What do I mean be that?
Let’s say that today I would like to log-in and do my standard computer usage, which is web-browsing and some documents editing. For that I use mostly default look-and-feel of KDE with my regular modification.
But, in the evening I boot-up and want to login to something like a “gaming setup”, with cool cyberpunk wallpaper and icons theme.
Next day I have some work to do, so I would like another profile with work related settings.

I don’t know if I am making myself clear right now:)
But in general, I would like to have a single user which could choose a different settings profile during login. This setting profile would modify mostly the look of desktop (like icons, wallpapers, fonts, dark/light mode), but could also impact for example visible widgets, some shortcuts or maybe even some display settings (I assume I might not need HDR and 180Hz during web browsing). But I log-in as the same user each time, so I do not impact my access rights etc.

Do you thinks it’s feasible?
Do you think it might be useful (to somebody but me)?
Or maybe it can be achieved in some other way and this idea is just rubbish?

Please let me know your thoughts.

Best regards,
Houdini.

2

Look at Konsave - load/save settings and appearance.

Look at Activities - very much overlooked and apparently perfect for your use-case. I used Activities extensively through covid to separate my son’s and my own desktop environment (though still the same USER logged in)… he had his own Firefox profile and unique environment which could be instantly switched out to get me back to my own.

4 Likes
3

Activities are what you want but, it’s not fully developed yet.

it his hoped that some day activities will include a full set of plasma .config files and some kind of manager to import/export them to other activities.

right now you are limited to having different backgrounds and application/folder arrangements, but not different virtual desktop schemes or default applications.

2 Likes
4

Activities can also have different power profiles and some applications themselves can be aware of activities.

In an older thread on activities someone linked to a script on github (IIRC) that launches browser with a different profile depending on the current activity

5

You can also try my KDE Migrant tool, but that requires multiple users (but you can copy settings easily over).

Although, I am not sure why you wouldn’t use multiple users for different environments including different settings.

6

Great! Thank you all very much.

It seems that I should take a deeper dive into Activities then. It looks like I should achieve what I intend with this feature.

Although, I might be back if I have any issues :smiling_face_with_sunglasses:

Thanks again!