Activities' future is a bit unclear at the moment. It overlaps with functionality provided by other services and the user story for how it fits into the desktop is unclear at best. However we also have to acknowledge that some people use activities to create a workflow that works for them. Rather than taking a sledgehammer to the concept, we're performing a more surgical approach of working out what use-cases people are trying to fix at finding the best solution to deliver that.
plasma needs to get back to a working state of session restore before activities can be of any use.
if plasma can’t shutdown and restore all the windows and folders that were open then there is no hope for activities being able to do that, which is the whole point of them.
under X11 session restore was working and there was hope that activities could be brought up to the same level of utility, but now that the regular desktop itself is hit or miss with session restore under wayland (and even X11 is now broken on plasma 5), i’ve losing hope that activities will ever live up to it’s potential.
it’s frankly a fantastic idea and like nothing else with any other DE, so its very sad that the plasma team could not fulfill this dream when they have done so well with so many others.
I am a heavy user of activities, for me it is the absolute killer feature.
Sure, without session restore (or inadequate like in X11) it takes a bit of time after each login to populate each activity correctly, e.g. starting Firefox on each activity with the associated profile.
However, even with perfect session restore I might still be doing that to avoid starting several Firefox (and IDE) sessions right at login.
This was not very likely on X11 since applications restore their windows themselves and very few have awareness of activities.
On Wayland this will be possible because KWin restores window positions and it is aware of activities.
if activity session restore was basically the same as regular session restore, but simply separated as Nate was proposing (each with their own config and state files), then applications would not need to be “activities aware”.
they would just need to be session aware, which many are still not under wayland.
i’m glad to hear that kwin is trying to pick up the slack, but last i heard restoring windows to the original position was something the app developers had to implement, which is why it doesn’t work well under wayland (developers have not done that work yet).
I was just explaining why restore is limited on X11 due to applications being responsible for window state restoration.
At this point the feature is not fully “official standard” yet so it is often hidden behind an environment variable or feature toggle.
Once this is rolled out it the application does indeed only need to support restoring its internal state, its window states will be restored by the compositor.
In the case of KWin it will restore the saved activity association.
On X11.
On Wayland that’s the job of the compositor (applications can’t even do it)
Activities are a big reason I use KDE! This change very negatively impacts my workflow.
I understand that the sub-session management needs to be removed as it is not currently working correctly. But could Activities keep the start and stop functionality so that users making use of Kactivitymanagerd to start and stop scripts based on the state of the activity can continue to manage that manually. And also have a way of managing what Activities can be switched between at any given time.
Thank you to all the KDE developers for their work on Activities and the entire KDE suite, your work is appreciated.
I also agree with @phd_doom - I use activities heavily (and I’m annoyed by the fact that current Waylad “fake session restore” doesn’t restore activity association), and I make use of the start/stop activity feature - not in the “freeze and thaw apps” sense (as that never worked) but as just a way to have an activity configuration (widgets and wallpapers) that is “stowed” because I don’t need it often and don’t want to mess my activity walking shortcuts (which are a mess anyway for anything other than two activities - see bug 419499).
The ability to have a ready made activity configured for when I need it, but having it paused as in “not participating in shortcut switching” is a huge feature for me (also, if there are widgets in the paused activity, having them not run is nice).
The alternative is that I will have to delete said activities, and every time I need that setup (usually once or twice a month, but every once in a while, daily) - to recreate the entire setup and live with the switching annoyance until I can delete them again. This is terrible. I may just move those workflows to a second user account - which will be a different type of terrible.