https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=341143
--- Comment #239 from David H. <davinos...@gmail.com> ---
Analogy time. Please bear with me, I promise that this is directly related to
the bug report...
Imagine you start a home business, and you set up a workshop in your garage to
make or repair things. In that room you have a workbench, and on that bench you
keep your various tools and working projects. Business is good, and you soon
find yourself running out of space, so you set up a second bench near the
first. And on it you have more tools, some of them being duplicates of those on
the first bench, and others unique, so you can work on slightly different
things. But you can also use the two benches in tandem when you have a really
big project. Later on you add a third bench, and a fourth, and so on, to give
you even more workspace.
Now you also need an office to manage your business. That's in another room of
your house. And in that room you have a desk with a computer, in/out-trays,
pens and pencils, pads of paper, and other office supplies on it. As you become
more successful you also put in a couple more tables, bookshelves, and cabinets
and whatnot, each with its own collection of supplies, to help improve your
productivity there too.
In the rest of the house of course you also have a living area, with a TV,
sofa, and various other facilities for relaxing, a kitchen/dining room for
preparing food and eating it, a bedroom for sleeping, bathroom, whatever. Each
room has its own purpose and its own unique set of accoutrements for fulfilling
that purpose. And for the most part you keep each kind activity to its own
space. You seldom, but not never, transfer what you're doing from one room to
another.
I hope you see where I'm going with this. Activities and Virtual Desktops,
while being similar in many ways, are most definitely *not* the same thing.
They categorize your work in different conceptual ways. Activities are like the
various rooms, each focused *thematically* on a certain functional area. V.D.s
are like the tables, benches, counters and other workspaces inside those rooms.
They *spatially* organize the work you're doing and provide the actual tools
with which to complete the various tasks within each area of activity.
Now to apply this to the actual bug (and the proposed solutions and
workarounds), I think most people are overlooking this foundational conceptual
flaw that lies behind it -- the lack of recognition of the psychological
separation between function space and work space, the differences in how we
view them and react to them, and the differences in the work flows we set up
within and between them.
Activities and V.D.s perform complementary roles, not identical ones. Trying to
replace or duplicate the one with the other is like saying four workshops with
one bench each are basically the same thing as one workshop with four benches.
They're not. Even if you put them right next to each other, cut doors between
the rooms for easy access, and add pushcarts, conveyor belts, or whatever for
the easy moving of projects between them, it's just never going to sit quite
right in your mind or your behavior. You'd still be trying to fit a square peg
into a round hole. Even worse, it could be seen as trying to put a workbench in
your office, or an office desk in your workshop, or a toaster in your bathroom.
Or say you do succeed in making the two experiences similar enough to not
notice the difference. Then what was the point in changing it in the first
place?
Anyway, to my mind an ideal KDE set-up would provide the following:
1. The ability to set up one or more Activities, each of which can be centered
around its own area of "business".
2. One or more Virtual Desktops inside each Activity, to provide the actual
work areas in which to operate within that Activity's scope.
3. Full, individual, customizability of each Desktop inside each Activity,
including...
3a. Setting the look and feel of each one so that it is clearly distinct
from the others, the background being one of the most vital elements in
creating that psychological, virtual "workspace".
3b. Individual customizability of the various widgets, toolbars and other
features that populate each Desktop.
3c. The ability to set any single feature or tool as either unique to that
Desktop or shared between all of them. Some features need to be always at hand,
just as a workman might carry a toolbelt between workbenches with his most-used
tools on it, while others can and should be confined to a certain workspace.
4. Multiple ways to quickly and easily navigate and move objects between
Desktops, the ability to smoothly switch between Activities, and simple, but
not necessarily as immediate, mechanisms for transferring and jumping to
programs between Activities. Perhaps on occasion you really do need to put a
toaster in the bathroom, but it will never be anywhere nearly as often as
moving it from one kitchen counter to another.
And really, the devs really should know this already, because that's pretty
much exactly how they tried to market Activities when KDE4 first came out.
Different "rooms" for different purposes. They've just overlooked how important
it is to be able to customize each room to the purpose it's been assigned to.
Finally, frankly, if anything had to be dropped, I'd dump the Activities in a
heartbeat. They've always felt like a solution in search of a problem to me.
For the majority of desktop users it's the computer itself that acts as the
function space. When people really do need different functional computing
spaces they more often than not just set up separate machines for them, or at
least separate user log-ins. Notice how the all of the solutions discussed here
have centered around trying to re-create the old Virtual Desktop experience
using Activities. *Nobody* is talking about using Activities as Activities in
and of themselves.
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