After reading this readme it still utterly unclear how it would be useful in any way.
activity might be “developing a KDE application”, “studying 19th century art”
OK, fine - and how other programs knowing this helps me at all? Is this used in practice in any way at all by any software? If yes, how specifically any software adjust its behaviour based on data collected by kactivitymanage?
Interesting, confusingly this seems to be other kind of activity logging than described in the readme file.
(and also one that I would expect per-program, not shared - is intention here to make file appear in list of recent ones for all software supporting it, once opened in one program?)
(also it may explain why it was busy fasting on my CPU - another program was creating thousands of files, maybe kactivitymanage was busy logging this activity)
kactivitymanagerd primarily helps manage user activitiejs - you can create multiple virtual workspaces and contexts for organising tasks, windows and workflow.
so ‘Activities’ like Work, Play, Study with separate sets of apps, widgets, layouts… then Resource trackign (which apps belong to which activity, restoring settings between them) as well as KDE features - like the window manager handling window rules per activity.
It helps manage resources when an activity is inactive.
If you don’t use activities, you could disable it - though it WILL break some KDE features.
It is per-program. But when you right-click on a taskbar icon, it shows a list of recent files. (Also in Kickoff’s “History” and search.) So it has to be recorded in a central place, instead of in each application’s own place and format.
No it won’t in that case. A record is generated only when you manually open a file in a supported (i.e. KDE) app, or one app launches another to open a file. E.g., the recent list of the taskbar Firefox icon only contains those links you click in some other app that opens Firefox. Anything you click inside Firefox won’t appear there because Firefox is not a KDE app and it doesn’t call the API to record an entry.
so if I am not running full KDE desktop and only installed some minor KDE programs (I do not even remember which ones) and kactivitymanage for some mysterious reason feasts on my CPU, then just uninstalling it would be a good idea, right?