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I get into phases where I use Activities, and I like the workflow, but then I forget about it for a while. I like having the separated workspace with no other thing showing up in the taskbar, but moving applications between the activities is a pain.
I'd like to see it stay but I don't have the knowledge to maintain it, so I guess I'm at the mercy of the KDE team's willingness to keep it on life support.
@ikidd @leopold
I use 4 work spaces & organize by my own system/categories as I start opening stuff after a weekly restart, a couple of vivaldi instances, firefox all with their own email & download locations
No special setup beyond me remembering my own scheme, easy to move stuff between work spaces
That should also be possible with virtual desktops
I finally found my use case for activities - switching between work and personal stuff. Having virtual desktops isn't enough to separate the two for me, but activities does the job really well. Would miss the feature if it goes the way of the Dodo in the future.
Exactly the same case for me.
What's the difference between activities and virtual desktops?
Activities do a lot more. Virtual desktops are purely a window management feature. They contain windows and very little else. Activities can have different, panels, wallpapers, desktop icons, etc.
The way I explain it is that it's virtual desktops that you can start and stop at will and run scripts when doing that as well as switching to and from activities. It also has different shortcuts like this other guy said
I'm using Activities as beefed up workspaces to better separate personal stuff and work stuff. And to have different icons and wallpapers. It can be handy and useful on a psychological level imo to have a work activity where I just stick to work and have my work tools in favourities and taskbar and when I'm taking a break or stopping for the day, I can easily switch to free time activity. And I can seamlessly jump between the two and stop what I'm doing and leave everything open without crowding the taskbar or something.
So consider this blog post notice that the feature is at risk of being eventually removed if people don’t step up to contribute technical work to either fix existing bugs, or else overhauling the feature to work differently.
I'd be sad to see it removed completely. I hope they keep it, even if it is left to that "power user" niche.
Personally, I’d like to see Activities morph into a feature whereby each activity has a separate set of settings and config data, but access to all the same user files. On top of that, you would be able to configure individual apps you use in multiple activities (like music players) to use shared settings and config data.This way it would basically be the “profiles” feature that many web browsers have now, but applied automatically to any and all apps you want.
This could be very cool.
I hope it sticks around and is refined further. I started using KDE maybe six months back, after not having touched it in probably 10ish years. Back then I hated KDE but now it's absolutely my favorite DE. Having regularly used virtual desktops before my switch to KDE, activities are a pretty big part of what I'm loving about the experience. The feature can be clunky in certain ways (mainly moving apps between activities), and I'd love to see further refinement, but even at its current state of implementation it helps so much with my own workflow.
At the moment I run 6 activities: "Default" which generally has a web browser open to my Proxmox servers' web panel, as well as a terminal, "Gaming", "Media", Work (Primary), Work (Secondary), and then "Other" for random crap that doesn't fit any of the main activities. I have hotkeys set up to easily switch between them, and each taskbar has different pinned apps.
Unfortunately I'm not really a coder so I can't contribute directly to maintaining it but I do hope the feature is either refined or merged into virtual desktops in a way that keeps its core benefits.
That's quite a lot of activities. You do know that plasma has also has virtual desktops, that work better in a lot of ways, right?
Virtual desktops are strictly worse for the purpose of separating things like work and gaming
Exactly (at least in my experience). I have my gaming apps pinned in my gaming activity, and my work apps in my work activities. The only annoyance there is when certain apps open in the "wrong" activity. For instance, I pretty much always have the Kate text editor up in my gaming activity because I play games with a million mods and constantly have to fix things. Because of that, when I need Kate for work it'll tend to open an instance in the gaming activity and I have to move it in the clunky way stuff gets moved between activities.
I know it has it, but at least for me I find activities to be more beneficial. I really like being able to customize them for each purpose. I'm also not sure if you can set custom hotkeys to go to a specific virtual desktop like you can with activities.
Obviously if activities get removed from KDE I'll go back to using virtual desktops but until then I'll make the most of them.