Alan McKinnon writes: > I "get" KDE (mostly) but some stuff is just bizarre: > > Activities. wtf are those?
I tink they are really cool, although I don't use them, and probably never will. But I'm not the average user. I have six virtual desktops (current screenshots are at http://www.wonkology.org/comp/desktop/2010-11-11/ ), each one has its purpose. For each window you can define the desktop it will run on. You change the desktop, and you get new windows displayed, while the plasmoids stay the same. With activities it's the other way around. You switch the activity, and the windows stay the same, but you get different plasmoids. For example, you have your default activity active, with some plasmoids, whatever they are. Then you want to inspect why the system is suddenly being slow, so you switch to your admin activity, which has all kinds of system monitors and loggers you normally prefer to not show up. I think that's the idea. I would just switch to desktop1 where I have some of these plasmoids, but that is my approach. Others seem to like these activities. A 3rd activity might show some newstickers and web plasmoids. While I would just switch to my desktop3, where I have this stuff. And a 4th activity could display folder views of various locations. You don't care about them normally, and use the desktop space for other things you like more. But when you want access to those folders, they are just one keystroke away. I would be surprised if you'd start using activities, I guess you're more the multiple desktop guy. But hey, as long as you don't add other activities, you don't have to care about them. I think there are further plans, like applications starting and quitting automatically when switching activities. So you put your desktop into different modes, according to the task you are currently doing. I'm doing all this stuff in parallel, so I just sort it on different desktops. There is much development going on currently, this stuff is still evolving. In 4.5.2, you had to use one activity per virtual desktop if you wanted to have different plasmoids on different desktops, or different wallpapers. This has changed, you can have different plasmoids on each desktop now (although I'm missing the 'sticky' option to have _some_ plasmoids on all desktops), and also different wallpapers. But who knows how this stuff will have evolved until KDE 4.7. Wonko
