> Personally i always used virtual desktops exactly for that, as "activities", > even before activities were a thing, "i need a new physical space to stuff > new windows" is not an use case that ever occurred to me in any way.... > noted that there are people which see virtual desktops like that.. will have > to be taken into account somehow, still consider it a pretty crazy use > case tough.
I'm going to be evil now. Wikipedia definition (not because W is flawless, but mostly because the 'crazy use case' comment ;) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_desktop In computing, a virtual desktop is a term used with respect to user interfaces, usually within the WIMP paradigm, to describe ways in which the virtual space of a computer's desktop environment is expanded beyond the physical limits of the screen's display area through the use of software. This compensates for a limited desktop area and can also be helpful in reducing clutter. > Ironically, to me activities never were really able to replace virtual > desktops as "activities", because its window management part never > got the love it deserved nad always lookedlike a kinda broken virtual > desktop implementation, so always falled back to the "multiple > workspaces" implementation kwin was really built around.. which is > virtual desktops. Now, while I agree with this statement, there is an "upside" to the problematic WM-presentation of activity switching. Activities are not meant to be switched overly often. In the way that I see activities, you switch to an activity and work for at least half an hour. If a project deserves less time to focus on than half an hour, it is either a one of a kind project, or it does not deserve to have a dedicated activity. With this in mind, having a non-pretty switching (though, I did try to make it prettier to an extent that kwin allows with the following script https://store.kde.org/p/1110510/) is not a huge problem. But I agree - it should be prettier. >> Previously, we had problems when we tried to equate activities with any >> specific thing. As in, 'an activity is a group of Plasma widgets'. The >> same will happen if the activity becomes 'a group of windows'. >> >> This has been discussed quite a few times before. > > mostly because i think the whole concept of activities always was a > blurry thing, because each one working on them had a different idea > about them to begin with This is also the truth - on two levels: - Everyone in the Plasma team who dipped their toes into activities had (at least slightly) different visions of what they are, I think this is the case because of the second level: - Activities *are* a blurry thing. I've seen so many different workflows that people created with them. While I have a clear vision of what activities are, I don't think we can make them exactly that. The same goes for the vision that anyone in Plasma team has. We need to try to make one or two more focused usage patterns more streamlined, but we can not make them *be* only that. As an analogy, imagine what would happen if we said 'Dolphin is too powerful, it allows users to have a really weird filesystem layouts, lets force them to have 5 directories Pictures, Videos, ...'. Even if this would fit a significant percentage of our user base, this is not something that we can do. We could make the main UI of Dolphin present the files like that while still allowing normal file management (like most Android file managers do), but we can not remove the 'powerful when needed' features altogether. Cheers, Ivan -- KDE, ivan.cu...@kde.org, http://cukic.co/ gpg key fingerprint: 292F 9B5C 5A1B 2A2F 9CF3 45DF C9C5 77AF 0A37 240A
