this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2021
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KDE & Plasma users
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I... don't get activities. They seem like a slightly enhanced workspace/desktop system, but the isolation is slightly higher and I never got the hang of it.
Think about it like having two separate user accounts on your system, but instead of having to log into each one separately and switch back and forth by going through SDDM, you can instead just tap a keyboard shortcut or however you have it set up and switch between a "work" and "personal" mode, or a "gaming" and a "normal" mode. You can have different apps pinned to your task bars, change layouts, etc.
That helps, but how deep is the personality change? Is it kde settings, or is it like ~/.config level, or do applications even not see each other?
Your explanation makes Firefox awareness 1000x more interesting, I used to run multiple profiles in parallel before Firefox containers but this would be nice to have contained work profiles, at the moment I just use chromium for work and Firefox for literally everything else.
@InverseParallax @semperverus if I understood https://yuenhoe.com/blog/2012/08/associating-firefox-profiles-with-kde-activities/ correctly, it uses a protocol called XSMP which programs need to support, but for me it only ever changed things inside plasmashell so either not a lot of programs support XSMP or XSMP doesnt work on Wayland. I think it would be more useful if it integrated Flatpak and snap, and used them to mount a different config directory based on the activity an app was launched it but idk if that would work well