A few years back, when a new version of plasma came out, there was a lot of discussion about activities and virtual desktops. I had been using the latter, but was convinced to go over to activities, which as a process was not entirely anodyne. Now, with plasma 6.4, the release video seems to be plugging virtual desktops. Did I miss something? Is there a reason for using one or the other? Are the two not redundant?
-
'I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up.' Mark Twain -
No you didn't miss anything, there just has been some tweaking to virtual desktops, to have some longstanding features seen in just about every other desktop environment.
Activities have been a thing since 2008 and KDE 4, virtual desktops have been around forever.
These two are not redundant as they do different things.
Virtual desktops = extra "monitors" to organize your application windows, that's it.
Activities = organize your work. An Activity can be seen as a unique set of widgets, taskbar items, *and* virtual desktops.
Activities are not well defined and not fleshed out, really.
But you can have Work_Activity that has its own widgets and apps pinned to the task manager, and associate your work email in Kmail to that Activity
Then have a Play_Activity with different wallpaper, pins, and a different email account visible.
The new feature mentioned in the release is being able to have different tiling setups per Virtual Desktop, which does aid in organizing windows for those who like a semi-tiling setup (shift-drag a window to use, and meta-t to adjust/edit the layout). This snap-zone thing has been around for quite a while.
-
Thanks, Claydoh. Sounds to me like I don't have to be in any hurry to change from activities back to virtual desktops. If it ain't broke...'I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up.' Mark TwainComment
Comment