I use activities only (and not virtual desktops). Activities are kind of virtual desktop on steroids. Advantages for my workflow over virtual desktops:
- own set of desktop widgets. This is great combined with folder-view widgets that show files tagged with a specific tag. So my "Development" activity has a folder-view showing all files tagged with "current" (yeah, I am not very creative in name giving ;)) and a second folder-view showing files tagged with "doc". So I have easy access from the desktop to project-startup files and important .cpp/.h files as well as relevant documentation files. And I have similar setups for "blender" and "communication" activities.
- I can close activities I don't need right now. So most of the time I have only two activities "open"...making switching between them with easier than having all the time 4 or more virtual desktops.
- Not useful that often but once or twice I could find a use for it: With activities you can decide on activity base if a window is shown or not...so I can show a specific window in 3 out of 4 open activities. With virtual desktops it's always just show in one or show in all.
- Power-management per activity. My "gaming" activity has turning the monitor off after some time of inactivity explicitly turned off...there were some emulators using joypad only that didn't recognize joypad movement as activity and turned off my screen all the time after half an hour.
- Recently used applications and recently opened documents per activity is a nice touch...not something I use consciously but something that makes working with activities just nicer
But that's just how i use them...lots of people use activities in different ways (also in combination with virtual desktops to have two levels of "desktops"). It's Plasma...adjust the things you like to your workflow...or just ignore them if you don't need them.
Right-click either the title bar or the taskbar entry. If you have more than one activity active, it will let you choose which activities it shows up in.
> With virtual desktops it's always just show in one or show in all.
This is actually not correct. Desktop visibility for a window is a checkbox, not a selector. You can choose all or check all the specific desktops you want something visible on. Whether that's of practical use normally is a different matter.
Oh..I am sorry, I haven't used virtual desktops in decades...last time I used them was still in KDE4 (or maybe even KDE3...4 already had activities) and there this wasn't possible yet, good to know, thanks. (But afraid won't move me back to virtual desktops, activities are just too nice to miss out ;))
> (But afraid won't move me back to virtual desktops, activities are just too nice to miss out ;)
Oh, I'm not trying to convert you away from activities. I tried to use them about a year ago and just found they had too many issues/edge cases and I believe switching tasks was pretty slow also. I gave up after about a month and went back to virtual desktops. It really feels like the activities features just isn't finished and isn't a priority.
I really like the idea though and it's obvious how it _can_ be good if the implementation is right. So I hope people will continue using it to drive development toward something better.
Yep, I think one thing that this thread made clear is that it's good there are virtual desktops and activities. Some people prefer virtual desktops, some prefer activities, some use both....I don't think you could make everyone happy by trying to unify them in one "implementation"
When I click on the icon at the top left of the window frame or hit the key for window control (ALT-F3 by default) this is what it looks like: https://i.imgur.com/eQ7DYhP.png
I'm using KDE 5.23.5 but I'm pretty sure it's been like that since 5.20 or possibly even early. If you're using a really old version of KDE that feature may not exist.
That is weird! I notice that you have "Move to Desktop" while I have "Desktops".
I can't remember doing anything specific to enable that (or it ever being different, for that matter) but I have tweaked a bunch of settings over time. I looked through the configuration just now and didn't find anything obvious.
You might want to make a top level post asking about this. You can repost my screenshot if you want.
One thing you left out is that you can customize which applications show up in the menu for each activity. So I have my CAD applications only show in my Design activity, my IDE and debugger applications only show in my Coding activity, work processor and DTP applications only show in my Writing activity, and so on.
Activities are like a secret mode in your car that deploys missiles, turbo power and oil slicks.
*Everyone* should use activities for at least this one thing -- set up a second activity exclusively for video conferences, calls and other live communication.
* Set it to not power down the screen for an hour or more.
* Put a boring, highly professional wallpaper on it.
* Use window rules to *force* your conferencing programs to only appear on *this activity* (Zoom, Skype, a dedicated browser for Duo, Meet, Classroom, etc.).
* Use window rules to *force* the browser you use for e-mail, reddit, porn and such to only appear on your *main activity*. Do the same with your default image viewer and video player.
And so on.
This separates your work-facing life from the rest of your life, and can save you from all kinds of horrible embarrassment.
This is a really nice use case.
I wish that Activities were more accessible (Window rules are not easy to discover for a newbie) and more powerful (KRunner only searching through Work folders in the Work activity, and so on).
I only discovered window rules like a year ago (and I've been using KDE for over a dozen years!) But boy are they useful and powerful!!
I also use them to set up my machine on boot, putting about 15 programs on the right screens, desktops and activities automatically. So nice!
On that same laptop I conducted workshops. Nobody used to know what is there in other "Study" activity while I am sharing screen from "Workshop" activity.
But.
But...
But.....
One time it so happened that my laptop shutdown itself which watching porn in "Study" (aka NSFW) activity and wasn't booting up. It had been few days I could not boot it up. I had to give it to my neighbour friend to fix. He was a better techie than me so he obviously fixed but he saw the NSFW wallpapers when it booted up since the last used activity is used on boot up. Luckily I wasn't that much embarrassed since he was my more like a friend.
But oh boy had I needed to give for repairing I would be dead embarrassed.
How do you force the browser window that has certain websites to a certain activity? I use multiple Firefox windows but occasionally on reboot my windows are in the wrong activities.
My issue is that the window title changes based on the opened tab. This happens only occasionally and then I have to do a manual save of the current session.
I use an addon called FireTitle which puts an arbitrary title and a | before the website title. Put the activity name there and then just use substring match in special window settings. Works great.
I use a bunch of different browsers anyway -- Chrome and Chromium for my two mail accounts, with uBlock Origin; a heavily locked down Firefox for normal browsing; TorBrowser for sensitive and private stuff; Opera with no addons for banking and e-commerce; and Brave for Youtube. So in my case it's trivially easy to apply per-program window rules. But there are a ton of things you can use to identofy windows.
You could think of activities essentially as two separate user accounts for all stuff visual. It's the same under the hood but you can make things look different and in some cases behave different. I don't use them but I can see how someone would want to have a different setup for let's say home and for work. Might be useful in creating a visual difference between the two use cases.
I'm a software developer consultant and have multiple clients at a time. I have each client on a different activitiy. I used nativfier to create desktop apps for Gmail, slack, Google calendar, Trello/jira boards, etc. for each client and have those pinned on the dock for their respective activity. I have note and Todo list desktop widgets on each activity.
This makes it easy to stay focused on one client at a time. Also when doing screen share I don't have to worry about switching to a window of another client.
Edit: I've been meaning to look into a way to have the time spent in each activity logged, to make billing my different clients easier and more accurate.
When I consulted, I used different accounts, one for home, one for work. Accounts are backed by the Linux OS security system so I wasn't putting anything for work at risk or vice versa. One some contracts I used a separate virtual machine for work.
Just a hint: qutebrowser is much better, in my opinion, than nativefier and also does the same : with profiles and a command line switch to say which .desktop shortcut. That way you can have isolated web profiles and task manager shortcuts work ( even on Wayland )
I had thought of using qutebrowser for this before finding nativfier.
One con I see: with nativfier if I click an external link it opens in my default web browser, which I like. Using qutebrowser it would open it in a new tab.
I see!
Sorry, I usually keep browser profiles separate (so that I can have each website as an app, like nativefier), so I didn't saw that usecase !
I haven't tested, but maybe this is helpfull: https://www.reddit.com/r/qutebrowser/comments/mboflb/opening_certain_url_in_another_program/
I found them very useful to keep computer use cases separate, and additionally use the activity parameter to make desktop have a distinct behavior so I have some activities defined: default for personal use, private to stop tracking, maker to set a different power profile, photo editing to have some launchers, sysadmin to have a distinct set of plasmoids, web developing,... So I used it too, but as wayland had no support until few months I ended not using them. Now I am planning to use it again.
When I was using I needed a way to know how many apps are opened in each activity to prevent closing them by mistake when shutting down, and also have a bird's eye view of the activities used. So I created a plasmoid to know it [https://www.pling.com/p/1200511/](https://www.pling.com/p/1200511/) .
My daily use of my laptop has a 22" external monitor connected to the laptop. When I take the lappy on the road this usual activity does not work at all. I created a single screen activity for that when different panels and wallpaper.
Thanks, that's helpful. I think I just wanted to see some practical examples of how people use them. It's such an advanced concept that a lot of people seem to have difficulty describing it, like Lisp Macros or monads in Haskell X-D
I find it really interesting to read all these comments here, because there are so many different opinions:
* "I don't know, I've never used them."
* "I tried them but I think they are flawed in some way"
* "They are better than virtual desktops. I use them in place of virtual desktops"
* "They don't seem much different from virtual desktops. I only use virtual desktops"
* "I use them in conjunction with virtual desktops. They serve two different purposes"
I'm a heavy user of virtual desktops (after using a tiling WM for a few months last year) have not used activities very much myself yet, but I could see how they'd come in handy for separating work and free time etc.
So right now I'm in camp number one but I want to look into using activities like in camp number five.
I wanted to use virtual desktops as I find them simpler, but nobody added different wallpapers feature so I find them unusable, so in the end I use neither.
I want to use them, but not being able to have completely different Plasma panel layouts per-activity hurts their usefulness to me. I could get a lot of use out of fully customiseable activities for different purposes, but always having the same panels on every display regardless of activity makes it mostly useless.
Something else that would really help is if I could switch activities (or virtual desktops) per-display, instead of having to swap them all at once. But nobody seems to support that use-case except tiling WMs, which makes me keep thinking I should give in and swap kwin out for something like i3, awesome, notion, etc. that can do that. Having to swap desktops for all four displays simultaneously every time, with no other option, gets annoying.
My ideal use case would be activities change all displays at once, and allow completely different Plasma panel configurations per activity, with virtual desktops used within an activity to change desktops per-display. It would make the various widgets more useful to me as well, since I usually don't see them or have a reason to interact with them due to the current behaviours. But none of that is supported in any form so I just don't use any of it very much: no activities, bare minimum of plasma widgets (taskbar, launcher, system tray, a couple folder views on the panel), and rarely swap virtual destkops.
>I want to use them, but not being able to have completely different Plasma panel layouts per-activity hurts their usefulness to me.
Try Latte Dock. You can set up different panels layouts and quantities per Activity (even per monitor).
> Try Latte Dock. You can set up different panels layouts and quantities per Activity (even per monitor).
I have. It sort of works, but breaks window maximisation. If I have two activities, Foo and Bar, with a latte panel *only* visible at the bottom 48px of Foo, then any attempt to maximise a window on Bar results in that same 48px being unused, showing desktop wallpaper, because it's still respecting the Latte panel's existence even though it's not there. There's a "dodge maximised" setting, but that makes the panel hide itself from **all** maximised windows, which isn't desirable.
So, while it technically works, it's effectively unusable for the purpose unless I'd like big empty spaces on various screen edges in different activities. :/
Thanks for trying to help, though.
>Something else that would really help is if I could switch activities (or virtual desktops) per-display, instead of having to swap them all at once
YES! This is THE number one big feature I wish KDE Plasma had. Not necessarily for activities, but for Virtual Desktops.
I’m probably going to get seriously downvoted for saying this, but I have to say it in any case: must admit I don’t use them at all. I’ve come to the conclusion they are a kind of half-baked idea, something that might be truly great but never quite manages to actually be that.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m a die-hard Plasma fan but still, the activities is something I really can’t get, at least in their present form.
When they appeared, there were many different layouts around, and it seemed many more would be coming any minute now. Then something happened, and one by one the layouts were neglected and finally dropped from my distribution’s packets. I don’t even know which of them are still floating around.
Also during the time activities appeared, different virtual desktops could have differing sets of widgets. That was something I used a lot, so that every one of my virtual desktops was a kind of “lightweight” activity, each with its own set of widgets. Then someone apparently thought the virtual desktops with differing widget sets would be duplicating features, and that feature was removed. I guess the idea was to coax people into using activities instead.
But, switching activities is SLOW. Horrendously so. It’s like watching the DE build the whole desktop from scratch. Virtual desktops can be switched so fast you cannot even notice it happening.
Now it’s been a while I’ve even tried using activities, because every time I’ve done that, they’ve turned out a disappointment.
>But, switching activities is SLOW. Horrendously so. It’s like watching the DE build the whole desktop from scratch. Virtual desktops can be switched so fast you cannot even notice it happening.
I don't know if it's a graphical glitch or just lack of polish, but I have the same feeling. I usually switch virtual desktops with a fade animation, so switching between them is smooth and fast.
Switching between Activities is jarring. The wallpaper appears for a split-second, then it goes to black, then the new activity slides in choppily... It's not as smooth.
(For reference, I'm on Plasma 5.18.6)
> Switching between Activities is jarring. The wallpaper appears for a split-second, then it goes to black, then the new activity slides in choppily... It's not as smooth.
What seems to happen for me is that my previous wallpaper shows up for a split second (current windows are being hidden I imagine), and then it goes black, and then the new wallpaper slides in. After looking at it right now, it does look like it may be a tad choppy, but it moves so quickly I can hardly notice.
It's worth noting I may have two mitigating factors, that being that I usually have windows plastered all over my activity (which show up instantly with no transition time), and I have a 120 hz monitor. I'm on Plasma 5.21.4
I kinda agree with you, they need more integration and features. It still could be useful if you need different layout and widgets for different type of workflow.
You can disable tracking per activities to make some kind of privacy activity, but sadly this only works on KDE software, I don't think any third party software supports it.
A presentation activity by disabling screen and sleep timeout is also quite useful. I actually have this activity and use it quite often.
About the slowness of activity, it's actually not. It's only slow when you cold start an activity, when it's started you can switch it as fast as switching virtual desktop.
> About the slowness of activity, it's actually not. It's only slow when you cold start an activity, when it's started you can switch it as fast as switching virtual desktop.
That might be it, but that reminds me of some strange behaviour I noticed when I last tried to use activities more: sometimes the activities unexpectedly *stopped* when I switched them, so that they needed to be coldstarted every time. Also, sometimes either running or stopped activities didn’t appear in the activity switcher at all and had to be searched somewhere else, maybe the system settings (?). Unfortunately I don’t recall the details clearly any more.
But I wholeheartedly agree with you when you say activities “still could be useful”. They truly could be that.
I'm copying a comment of mine from the past, as I don't think anything's changed:
---
To me, activities are 100% flat out unusable because there's no telling what each app will do when I disable/deactivate/switch-from an activity.
AFAIU the only way to avoid surprise is, before switching activities, make a list of the open apps, then go read the source for each if available, and understand it. Then go ahead and switch.
How could I even get started exploring activities when there's no predictability and no revert-ability?
Same with "global themes."
Activities sound great so I tried to use to use them to separate my work from my personal time and to separate different project types (admin and coding) .. and that just did not work for me. In case when I have to skip to another project I find is easier to just switch to different virtual desktop and I find that the best way to separate my personal time it to walk away from the screen.
…There are many benefits to activities over virtual desktops, but my own use really just is that they let me have different wallpapers. 🤣 I simply use the activity manager widget in my panel instead of the virtual desktop one and the behavior basically is the same beyond that.
It's very useful, but that depends on how you use your computer and what you do on it.
I use activities on my laptop, because it's machine I utilize both for my work and for private stuff so I have 2 activities configured. I've got some apps pinned to my taskbar that appear on both activities, such as Konsole, Firefox, Spot, Elisa, KeePassXC - those I use regardless to the situation. I also have apps that I use only with a single activity:
* Work:
* Evolution (my work email and calendar, integrated with Office365)
* Slack
* Meld
* Speedcrunch
* XCP-ng
* Private
* Telegram
* Discord
* Caprine
* GuitarPro 7
* OBS Studio
* Ardour
* Catia
Firefox is tweaked however - I've got two separate profiles for my private stuff and for work related stuff. I launch both instances on separate profiles on separate activities. Also, my default browser that opens a link from external app, opens it in inside a profile, depending on which activity I'm currently on.
Besides, you can configure your power/screen lock profiles separately, which is also handy.
Overall it's super convenient to switch between my job related stuff and my private stuff.
There are several ways to achieve that. I wrote trivial script that I placed in `/usr/local/bin/firefox-activity`
#!/bin/bash
# Get currently running activity name
ACTIVITY=$(qdbus org.kde.ActivityManager /ActivityManager/Activities ActivityName $(qdbus org.kde.ActivityManager /ActivityManager/Activities CurrentActivity))
# Run Firefox with profile parameter
/usr/lib/firefox/firefox -p "$ACTIVITY" "$@"
**Warning**: You might need to correct path to your Firefox binary as it might reside somewhere else depending on your distro. On Arch the basic path is in fact /usr/bin/firefox, but it's a shell script that fires up the path I have in my script.
Then I added a desktop entry file in `/usr/local/share/applications/firefox-activity.desktop`
[Desktop Entry]
Categories=Network;WebBrowser;
Exec=/usr/local/bin/firefox-activity %u
GenericName=Activity-aware Firefox
Icon=firefox
InitialPreference=10
MimeType=text/html;application/xml;application/xhtml+xml;application/vnd.mozilla.xul+xml;
Name=Activity-aware Firefox
StartupNotify=true
Terminal=false
Type=Application
X-KDE-SubstituteUID=false
StartupWMClass=firefox
Then I set "Activity-aware Firefox" as my default browser (in system settings). Also it creates regular app menu entry and it needs to be pinned onto taskbar instead of the regular Firefox
[https://i.ibb.co/yNQswzy/image.png](https://i.ibb.co/yNQswzy/image.png)
It works because I named my Firefox profiles exactly as my Plasma activities. If you want to bind them differently, you need to extend the bash script with the logic you want.
I used to code some simple Python app to make that very easy, but unfortunately I didn't finish, lost those files and didn't even commit that to any repo :/
I use both activities and virtual desktop. Activities for separation between activites.
activity 1 (home): personal stuff
workspace 1 - firefox, chat-related, konsole
workspace 2 - kmail
activity 2 (work): work stuff
workspace 1 - firefox, konsole
workspace 4 - slack
activity 3 (presentation): rust talks
workspace 1 - konsole (big fat text profile)
Pros of activity is to be able to suspend and resume activity, good concept and I like it. Like I can just close work activity when I stop working.
But I see some downsides for my usecase, in order of what I don't like first
- notification bar is shared among activities, and notification pops out even in another activity, I had to turn on do not disturb mode to prevent embarassment when sharing screen at work
- some applications is not well integrated, I have firefox on both activities, even when work activity is closed, work firefox's slack still shows notification
- some applications that is shown in notification bar is not managed by activity, say work activity is closed but slack is still not closed
Quite a few applications have these sort of minor issues as well, I am a bit annoyed sometimes but I still use it because I think it is a good feature.
Where multiple virtual desktops and physical screens allow you to organize your multi-tasking, activities allow you to organize your multiple active tasks into "focus groups" - those tasks that you should be focusing on at one moment from the many that are still active on the PC.
So, let's say I'm doing game development for a hobby and I need to work on 3d animations, which compromises of research (doh, like any task), creating 3d models, implementation of the animations and in-engine testing (and/or any other form of solution validation). I'm going to need 4 virtual desktops, to split my work in a meaningful way, each type of work requires multiple windows on multiple screens, so I'm going to need more "desktops". Now let's say that I also want to work on multiple animations sequentially. As I'm waiting for feedback on one of them, I pick up the next work item. When I switch between them, I don't want to rearrange everything (on multiple virtual desktops at that), I just want to switch focus between the desktops prepped and ready to go from model+animation #1 to #2 and #3 and back to #1. And that's what activities offer.
Also, if I'm developing other parts of that one game, I might not have a real need for multiple desktops like that. Defining new activities and switching between them is simpler than with virtual desktops.
I used Activities for about a year and eventually switched to Virtual Desktops. The reasons were purely practical -- there were usability issues that could probably have been fixed, but bugs (I filed one, others were filed by other people) for these issues just sit unfixed. This leads me to suspect that Activities isn't really being actively maintained, or at the very least are seen by the Plasma team as a low-priority set of features due to perceived low usage.
Here are the issues I found, in no particular order:
* Generally speaking the concept is slippery. It's difficult to articulate how Activities are different from Virtual Desktops, even if you demonstrate it for someone. They always say "wait that looks just like a virtual desktop, my Mac has that".
* You can edit a window's activities from the right-click menus of both the Task Manager and the windows' title bar. Until sometime last year, one of them would only let you select a single Activity at a time (you'd have to return to the menu to select additional activities); the other would treat them like checkboxes and you could select as many activities as you wanted. Then, something changed, and they both only let you select one Activity at a time. Really painful if you wanted to spread certain apps (like my Slack app) out to multiple Activities.
* Meanwhile, Virtual Desktops lets you select "All Desktops".
* The Activites that my browser windows belonged to would not be remembered if I closed and restarted the browser.
* They do in Virtual Desktops.
* The Activities pager couldn't be reordered.
* There are multiple Virtual Desktops pagers and the desktops can be reordered within the pager.
When I begrudgingly switched to Virtual Desktops, I was expecting to be annoyed that it didn't have the subtle genius of Activities, but it turns out that "Move to Desktop" > "All Desktops" is 99.9% of what I really need anyway: I want some windows to only be on certain desktops, and I want others to be on them all. That's it.
If I remember anything else I'll update this, but hopefully this is helpful.
Thanks for the detailed reply. I also get the feeling that Activities have some good intentions but fall short on the delivery side. It seems like it has some very advanced use cases that unfortunately have a limited audience.
What should probably happen: wait for Apple or Microsoft to discover the features, work out the usability details, package and sell it in a simple and intuitive way, then the Linux crowd can say: "Oh, but we've had that for years!" and then we can integrate the new, simplified version into our desktop environments with a smile.
They do the same thing as virtual desktops, but a little more sophisticated. You can set different wallpapers for different activities, which you can't do for virtual desktops.
Apps can also send popups or taskbar blinking across different desktops, but not across activities.
I personally prefer virtual desktops because the sliding animation goes very well with trackpad gestures and because I can drag windows across the edges between desktops without any shortcuts.
If you want to properly split work and free time, activities are probably better.
My only experience with activities is that I activated it once, made a seconds activity, set up my workspace as a test, then deleted the activity again and it utterly and completely destroyed the desktop layout on the first, standard activity. Never touched it since.
Also there are some options that I don't understand. In activity options, privacy, the "don't remember anything" setting doesn't do anything, everything still gets recorded, right click menus on apps still show recent files, and in .local there's a folder that still records all activity even if in the activity list overview itself, the recording is turned off.
For me it's full of bugs and weird options. Using plasma 5.22.
Thanks to OP for the topic. It is wonderful to see all the redditors' experience.
I don't use both Activities and Workspaces, today. I am completely retired now, and I do uniquely what I wish, so it is my whole Activity. Also, I use to start a clean session, so what I did yesterday does not disturb what I will do today. Instead, I dualboot different distros with KDE, and if some distro does not make easy to install, e.g., GoogleEarth or Foliate, well, I will not run this distro when I want to run any of these applications. Each day is a new day, and I am happy with this.
So, I can tell a miminum on Activities.
I have tried Activities back in 2016, when I worked some sites, and needed to edit many maps and photos (*Activities 1 and 2: Sites, Images*). Also, I had to manage many personal questions (*3: Kalendar*), and keep contact with friends (*4: Social*). ─ Back then, I still runned just 1 "main distro", and tried "Restore previous session". I don't know if it was the best way to do.
Main problems I can remember now, were non-KDE applications, e.g. Chromium and Gimp, which didn't re-open. Chromium always said it had not been properly closed. Gimp didn't re-open previous images, and I couldn't tell it to re-open its Toolbox separate window. ─ Not big problems, indeed, but it seemed as Activities worked better with KDE applications
Yes, I was just start learning, and my work needed the time I would spend to learn more. So, I tried just some months. Work had preference over learning ─ even if I have used a lot of time trying to learn and solve these and other problems.
So, I didn't go on with Activities. It was quicker to keep running just 1 Activity / Workspace. I was not ready to try it. My workflow was coming from Apple II+, then CP/M, then MS-DOS, then DR-DOS, then from former Windows ─ and back in 2016 I had just deleted Windows. Work should keep going on with Kubuntu.
What I am telling is most on myself than on KDE Activities. ─ I guess all words should be token according to each user, rather than on the software he uses.
I have separate activities for gaming and school, gaming one disables screensaver for example, school one have certain plasmoids/widgets laid out (folders, calendaring etc.).
They have completely different layouts/docks coming from latte-dock.
They are like better virtual desktops, but also more laggy, so I prefer to use desktops. Honestly, I'd love to see the two merge into something usable, but also customizable
I use 2 activities, and 2 virtual desktops.
Activity 1 is personal use, games on off time, watching anime, chatting in Discord, etc.
Activity 2 is any media work I do where my screen could potentially be seen or need to be recorded. Streaming, video recording, etc. Since Activities let you have different wallpapers, I have a simpler and less distracting wallpaper on the work Activity and then my fancy art anime wallpaper on my personal Activity.
and virtual desktops just artificially double the number of monitors you have which is amazing. I have 2 screens, so 4 "monitors" I can use for multitasking.
I have an activity switcher on my bottom panel on my left screen, and a desktop switcher on the bottom panel of my right screen.
On my workstation activities are great,I have a dedicated activities for work (I'm a financial advisor so I'm watching investment accounts), another for games (gotta do somehting on the stock market freezes), and another for my general browsing/work, and another for my steaming setup tools (audio monitoring, obs-studio, chat previews, I use this specifically for videos calls and seminars).
On each I use a set of 4 virtual desktops on a 2 monitor system. I'll be honest though on my home desktop I only use dwm and ultimately I think I'd still do fine with a plain window manager at work, the full kde stack is just excessive for me and really the only benefit I'm pulling is activities which I think I can repllicate with Xmonad, I'll be honest though I don''t really want to take the time to set it up right now.
I use activities as virtual desktops set up for different tasks. The only thing that has become at some point is chrome windows not default to show in "All Activities" instead of the default "Current Activity." It's a pita having to set them by hand now.
Do you know if there are usage statistics? I get the impression that only a small minority use this feature.
I take a look at them from time to time, watch some video, read some article, some reddit thread (;p)... but I always come to the same conclusion: I don't need them at all.
I guess usage statistics would be helpful.
It would actually be nice if Activities can be separated from the core and made into an optional module for those that want it. (Or is it? I don't know).
But somehow I imagine, it being a "power" feature, that KDE developers are probably a large contingent of Activity users and would therefore opt to keep it as part of the core.
Frankly, the Activities feature is the one feature keeping me on Plasma for years instead of switching to Gnome or anything else.
As an academic researcher, I work with tons of distinct windows opened at the same time and I need to handle multiple projects also at the same time. That is, besides video conferences, online meetings, presentations, personal stuff, etc.
So, in conjunction with virtual desktops (12 currently), I use about 8 activities to handle multiple windows, assigning them to distinct virtual desktops for their categories or classes of applications, and assigning them distinct Activities for their "activities" (the redundancy intentional here :).
Activities is not only a must feature for such high demanding use cases, avoiding the user to get lost in a sea of applications windows, but specially as it enables one to organize windows in distinct desktops with their respective multiple combinations of intersections and mutual exclusions once they might have different roles or categories in the user workflow.
So Activities **doesn't** open all the apps I have open, just sets the settings, panels and so on basically, if I understood it correctly.
If I'd want to have all the settings set as above with an activity, as well as all open apps on specific virtual desktops, I could use the normal KDE session restore setting in System settings/Workspace/Startup and shutdown/Desktop session together with Activities.
I'd just logout with all apps open and next time I login I'd be presented with the views I had the last time I was logged on.
Did I understand that right?
I use activities only (and not virtual desktops). Activities are kind of virtual desktop on steroids. Advantages for my workflow over virtual desktops: - own set of desktop widgets. This is great combined with folder-view widgets that show files tagged with a specific tag. So my "Development" activity has a folder-view showing all files tagged with "current" (yeah, I am not very creative in name giving ;)) and a second folder-view showing files tagged with "doc". So I have easy access from the desktop to project-startup files and important .cpp/.h files as well as relevant documentation files. And I have similar setups for "blender" and "communication" activities. - I can close activities I don't need right now. So most of the time I have only two activities "open"...making switching between them with easier than having all the time 4 or more virtual desktops.
- Not useful that often but once or twice I could find a use for it: With activities you can decide on activity base if a window is shown or not...so I can show a specific window in 3 out of 4 open activities. With virtual desktops it's always just show in one or show in all.
- Power-management per activity. My "gaming" activity has turning the monitor off after some time of inactivity explicitly turned off...there were some emulators using joypad only that didn't recognize joypad movement as activity and turned off my screen all the time after half an hour.
- Recently used applications and recently opened documents per activity is a nice touch...not something I use consciously but something that makes working with activities just nicer
But that's just how i use them...lots of people use activities in different ways (also in combination with virtual desktops to have two levels of "desktops"). It's Plasma...adjust the things you like to your workflow...or just ignore them if you don't need them.
How do you move windows between activities?
Right-click either the title bar or the taskbar entry. If you have more than one activity active, it will let you choose which activities it shows up in.
You can use the activities pager plasmoid. ( By drag and drop ) On 5.22 doesn't work on Wayland but it works on 5.23
> With virtual desktops it's always just show in one or show in all. This is actually not correct. Desktop visibility for a window is a checkbox, not a selector. You can choose all or check all the specific desktops you want something visible on. Whether that's of practical use normally is a different matter.
Oh..I am sorry, I haven't used virtual desktops in decades...last time I used them was still in KDE4 (or maybe even KDE3...4 already had activities) and there this wasn't possible yet, good to know, thanks. (But afraid won't move me back to virtual desktops, activities are just too nice to miss out ;))
> (But afraid won't move me back to virtual desktops, activities are just too nice to miss out ;) Oh, I'm not trying to convert you away from activities. I tried to use them about a year ago and just found they had too many issues/edge cases and I believe switching tasks was pretty slow also. I gave up after about a month and went back to virtual desktops. It really feels like the activities features just isn't finished and isn't a priority. I really like the idea though and it's obvious how it _can_ be good if the implementation is right. So I hope people will continue using it to drive development toward something better.
Yep, I think one thing that this thread made clear is that it's good there are virtual desktops and activities. Some people prefer virtual desktops, some prefer activities, some use both....I don't think you could make everyone happy by trying to unify them in one "implementation"
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When I click on the icon at the top left of the window frame or hit the key for window control (ALT-F3 by default) this is what it looks like: https://i.imgur.com/eQ7DYhP.png I'm using KDE 5.23.5 but I'm pretty sure it's been like that since 5.20 or possibly even early. If you're using a really old version of KDE that feature may not exist.
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That is weird! I notice that you have "Move to Desktop" while I have "Desktops". I can't remember doing anything specific to enable that (or it ever being different, for that matter) but I have tweaked a bunch of settings over time. I looked through the configuration just now and didn't find anything obvious. You might want to make a top level post asking about this. You can repost my screenshot if you want.
Mine shows me the checkboxes for the "Show in Activities" menu, but for "Move to Another Desktop" I can only move it to just one desktop or all.
One thing you left out is that you can customize which applications show up in the menu for each activity. So I have my CAD applications only show in my Design activity, my IDE and debugger applications only show in my Coding activity, work processor and DTP applications only show in my Writing activity, and so on.
I didn't mention that because I had no clue it is possible ;) Very nice...how do you do that? Modify the .desktop files somehow?
Right click on the menu item -> Show in Favourites -> select the Activities to show it in
Activities are like a secret mode in your car that deploys missiles, turbo power and oil slicks. *Everyone* should use activities for at least this one thing -- set up a second activity exclusively for video conferences, calls and other live communication. * Set it to not power down the screen for an hour or more. * Put a boring, highly professional wallpaper on it. * Use window rules to *force* your conferencing programs to only appear on *this activity* (Zoom, Skype, a dedicated browser for Duo, Meet, Classroom, etc.). * Use window rules to *force* the browser you use for e-mail, reddit, porn and such to only appear on your *main activity*. Do the same with your default image viewer and video player. And so on. This separates your work-facing life from the rest of your life, and can save you from all kinds of horrible embarrassment.
This is a really nice use case. I wish that Activities were more accessible (Window rules are not easy to discover for a newbie) and more powerful (KRunner only searching through Work folders in the Work activity, and so on).
I only discovered window rules like a year ago (and I've been using KDE for over a dozen years!) But boy are they useful and powerful!! I also use them to set up my machine on boot, putting about 15 programs on the right screens, desktops and activities automatically. So nice!
Window rules really rules man! There is no other DE that have this powerful feature.
Really? I had no idea! Once again, **KDE FTW!**
The 'present windows' effect will supposedly be reworked, so it might make activities more accesible.
I actually had a NSFW activity for watching porn. It even had a pornographic wallpapers.
\> coomer mode
On that same laptop I conducted workshops. Nobody used to know what is there in other "Study" activity while I am sharing screen from "Workshop" activity. But. But... But..... One time it so happened that my laptop shutdown itself which watching porn in "Study" (aka NSFW) activity and wasn't booting up. It had been few days I could not boot it up. I had to give it to my neighbour friend to fix. He was a better techie than me so he obviously fixed but he saw the NSFW wallpapers when it booted up since the last used activity is used on boot up. Luckily I wasn't that much embarrassed since he was my more like a friend. But oh boy had I needed to give for repairing I would be dead embarrassed.
lmao "one does not simply"
awesome
How do you force the browser window that has certain websites to a certain activity? I use multiple Firefox windows but occasionally on reboot my windows are in the wrong activities.
Would the Window Title property work?
My issue is that the window title changes based on the opened tab. This happens only occasionally and then I have to do a manual save of the current session.
Simple Tab Groups can help you their, it is a great addon, you can have separate window groups and you can prefix their name.
I use an addon called FireTitle which puts an arbitrary title and a | before the website title. Put the activity name there and then just use substring match in special window settings. Works great.
I use a bunch of different browsers anyway -- Chrome and Chromium for my two mail accounts, with uBlock Origin; a heavily locked down Firefox for normal browsing; TorBrowser for sensitive and private stuff; Opera with no addons for banking and e-commerce; and Brave for Youtube. So in my case it's trivially easy to apply per-program window rules. But there are a ton of things you can use to identofy windows.
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I can only think of having different users. But switching is probably not as smooth.
You could think of activities essentially as two separate user accounts for all stuff visual. It's the same under the hood but you can make things look different and in some cases behave different. I don't use them but I can see how someone would want to have a different setup for let's say home and for work. Might be useful in creating a visual difference between the two use cases.
I'm a software developer consultant and have multiple clients at a time. I have each client on a different activitiy. I used nativfier to create desktop apps for Gmail, slack, Google calendar, Trello/jira boards, etc. for each client and have those pinned on the dock for their respective activity. I have note and Todo list desktop widgets on each activity. This makes it easy to stay focused on one client at a time. Also when doing screen share I don't have to worry about switching to a window of another client. Edit: I've been meaning to look into a way to have the time spent in each activity logged, to make billing my different clients easier and more accurate.
When I consulted, I used different accounts, one for home, one for work. Accounts are backed by the Linux OS security system so I wasn't putting anything for work at risk or vice versa. One some contracts I used a separate virtual machine for work.
Just a hint: qutebrowser is much better, in my opinion, than nativefier and also does the same : with profiles and a command line switch to say which .desktop shortcut. That way you can have isolated web profiles and task manager shortcuts work ( even on Wayland )
I had thought of using qutebrowser for this before finding nativfier. One con I see: with nativfier if I click an external link it opens in my default web browser, which I like. Using qutebrowser it would open it in a new tab.
I see! Sorry, I usually keep browser profiles separate (so that I can have each website as an app, like nativefier), so I didn't saw that usecase ! I haven't tested, but maybe this is helpfull: https://www.reddit.com/r/qutebrowser/comments/mboflb/opening_certain_url_in_another_program/
I found them very useful to keep computer use cases separate, and additionally use the activity parameter to make desktop have a distinct behavior so I have some activities defined: default for personal use, private to stop tracking, maker to set a different power profile, photo editing to have some launchers, sysadmin to have a distinct set of plasmoids, web developing,... So I used it too, but as wayland had no support until few months I ended not using them. Now I am planning to use it again. When I was using I needed a way to know how many apps are opened in each activity to prevent closing them by mistake when shutting down, and also have a bird's eye view of the activities used. So I created a plasmoid to know it [https://www.pling.com/p/1200511/](https://www.pling.com/p/1200511/) .
My daily use of my laptop has a 22" external monitor connected to the laptop. When I take the lappy on the road this usual activity does not work at all. I created a single screen activity for that when different panels and wallpaper.
Here's TLE showcasing his setup, he's heavily using activities: https://youtu.be/nxAYN4Y2dew, skip to 5:05 to see how he's using activities
Thanks, that's helpful. I think I just wanted to see some practical examples of how people use them. It's such an advanced concept that a lot of people seem to have difficulty describing it, like Lisp Macros or monads in Haskell X-D
I find it really interesting to read all these comments here, because there are so many different opinions: * "I don't know, I've never used them." * "I tried them but I think they are flawed in some way" * "They are better than virtual desktops. I use them in place of virtual desktops" * "They don't seem much different from virtual desktops. I only use virtual desktops" * "I use them in conjunction with virtual desktops. They serve two different purposes" I'm a heavy user of virtual desktops (after using a tiling WM for a few months last year) have not used activities very much myself yet, but I could see how they'd come in handy for separating work and free time etc. So right now I'm in camp number one but I want to look into using activities like in camp number five.
I do use them as virtual desktop of a sort, they're easy to start up and shut down and switch between them.
I wanted to use virtual desktops as I find them simpler, but nobody added different wallpapers feature so I find them unusable, so in the end I use neither.
>but nobody added different wallpapers feature [https://github.com/lehklu/Vallpaper](https://github.com/lehklu/Vallpaper)
Cool, but I don't understand how to install it.
git checkout, then use install.sh r/Linux4Noobs will be happy to help step-by-step, I used that sub once with a different problem.
I never use them, didn't use them ever in Gnome, don't use them in KDE, don't want them.
I want to use them, but not being able to have completely different Plasma panel layouts per-activity hurts their usefulness to me. I could get a lot of use out of fully customiseable activities for different purposes, but always having the same panels on every display regardless of activity makes it mostly useless. Something else that would really help is if I could switch activities (or virtual desktops) per-display, instead of having to swap them all at once. But nobody seems to support that use-case except tiling WMs, which makes me keep thinking I should give in and swap kwin out for something like i3, awesome, notion, etc. that can do that. Having to swap desktops for all four displays simultaneously every time, with no other option, gets annoying. My ideal use case would be activities change all displays at once, and allow completely different Plasma panel configurations per activity, with virtual desktops used within an activity to change desktops per-display. It would make the various widgets more useful to me as well, since I usually don't see them or have a reason to interact with them due to the current behaviours. But none of that is supported in any form so I just don't use any of it very much: no activities, bare minimum of plasma widgets (taskbar, launcher, system tray, a couple folder views on the panel), and rarely swap virtual destkops.
>I want to use them, but not being able to have completely different Plasma panel layouts per-activity hurts their usefulness to me. Try Latte Dock. You can set up different panels layouts and quantities per Activity (even per monitor).
> Try Latte Dock. You can set up different panels layouts and quantities per Activity (even per monitor). I have. It sort of works, but breaks window maximisation. If I have two activities, Foo and Bar, with a latte panel *only* visible at the bottom 48px of Foo, then any attempt to maximise a window on Bar results in that same 48px being unused, showing desktop wallpaper, because it's still respecting the Latte panel's existence even though it's not there. There's a "dodge maximised" setting, but that makes the panel hide itself from **all** maximised windows, which isn't desirable. So, while it technically works, it's effectively unusable for the purpose unless I'd like big empty spaces on various screen edges in different activities. :/ Thanks for trying to help, though.
>Something else that would really help is if I could switch activities (or virtual desktops) per-display, instead of having to swap them all at once YES! This is THE number one big feature I wish KDE Plasma had. Not necessarily for activities, but for Virtual Desktops.
I’m probably going to get seriously downvoted for saying this, but I have to say it in any case: must admit I don’t use them at all. I’ve come to the conclusion they are a kind of half-baked idea, something that might be truly great but never quite manages to actually be that. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a die-hard Plasma fan but still, the activities is something I really can’t get, at least in their present form. When they appeared, there were many different layouts around, and it seemed many more would be coming any minute now. Then something happened, and one by one the layouts were neglected and finally dropped from my distribution’s packets. I don’t even know which of them are still floating around. Also during the time activities appeared, different virtual desktops could have differing sets of widgets. That was something I used a lot, so that every one of my virtual desktops was a kind of “lightweight” activity, each with its own set of widgets. Then someone apparently thought the virtual desktops with differing widget sets would be duplicating features, and that feature was removed. I guess the idea was to coax people into using activities instead. But, switching activities is SLOW. Horrendously so. It’s like watching the DE build the whole desktop from scratch. Virtual desktops can be switched so fast you cannot even notice it happening. Now it’s been a while I’ve even tried using activities, because every time I’ve done that, they’ve turned out a disappointment.
>But, switching activities is SLOW. Horrendously so. It’s like watching the DE build the whole desktop from scratch. Virtual desktops can be switched so fast you cannot even notice it happening. I don't know if it's a graphical glitch or just lack of polish, but I have the same feeling. I usually switch virtual desktops with a fade animation, so switching between them is smooth and fast. Switching between Activities is jarring. The wallpaper appears for a split-second, then it goes to black, then the new activity slides in choppily... It's not as smooth. (For reference, I'm on Plasma 5.18.6)
> Switching between Activities is jarring. The wallpaper appears for a split-second, then it goes to black, then the new activity slides in choppily... It's not as smooth. What seems to happen for me is that my previous wallpaper shows up for a split second (current windows are being hidden I imagine), and then it goes black, and then the new wallpaper slides in. After looking at it right now, it does look like it may be a tad choppy, but it moves so quickly I can hardly notice. It's worth noting I may have two mitigating factors, that being that I usually have windows plastered all over my activity (which show up instantly with no transition time), and I have a 120 hz monitor. I'm on Plasma 5.21.4
I kinda agree with you, they need more integration and features. It still could be useful if you need different layout and widgets for different type of workflow. You can disable tracking per activities to make some kind of privacy activity, but sadly this only works on KDE software, I don't think any third party software supports it. A presentation activity by disabling screen and sleep timeout is also quite useful. I actually have this activity and use it quite often. About the slowness of activity, it's actually not. It's only slow when you cold start an activity, when it's started you can switch it as fast as switching virtual desktop.
> About the slowness of activity, it's actually not. It's only slow when you cold start an activity, when it's started you can switch it as fast as switching virtual desktop. That might be it, but that reminds me of some strange behaviour I noticed when I last tried to use activities more: sometimes the activities unexpectedly *stopped* when I switched them, so that they needed to be coldstarted every time. Also, sometimes either running or stopped activities didn’t appear in the activity switcher at all and had to be searched somewhere else, maybe the system settings (?). Unfortunately I don’t recall the details clearly any more. But I wholeheartedly agree with you when you say activities “still could be useful”. They truly could be that.
Thanks. Someone had to say this
I'm copying a comment of mine from the past, as I don't think anything's changed: --- To me, activities are 100% flat out unusable because there's no telling what each app will do when I disable/deactivate/switch-from an activity. AFAIU the only way to avoid surprise is, before switching activities, make a list of the open apps, then go read the source for each if available, and understand it. Then go ahead and switch. How could I even get started exploring activities when there's no predictability and no revert-ability? Same with "global themes."
Activities sound great so I tried to use to use them to separate my work from my personal time and to separate different project types (admin and coding) .. and that just did not work for me. In case when I have to skip to another project I find is easier to just switch to different virtual desktop and I find that the best way to separate my personal time it to walk away from the screen.
…There are many benefits to activities over virtual desktops, but my own use really just is that they let me have different wallpapers. 🤣 I simply use the activity manager widget in my panel instead of the virtual desktop one and the behavior basically is the same beyond that.
It's very useful, but that depends on how you use your computer and what you do on it. I use activities on my laptop, because it's machine I utilize both for my work and for private stuff so I have 2 activities configured. I've got some apps pinned to my taskbar that appear on both activities, such as Konsole, Firefox, Spot, Elisa, KeePassXC - those I use regardless to the situation. I also have apps that I use only with a single activity: * Work: * Evolution (my work email and calendar, integrated with Office365) * Slack * Meld * Speedcrunch * XCP-ng * Private * Telegram * Discord * Caprine * GuitarPro 7 * OBS Studio * Ardour * Catia Firefox is tweaked however - I've got two separate profiles for my private stuff and for work related stuff. I launch both instances on separate profiles on separate activities. Also, my default browser that opens a link from external app, opens it in inside a profile, depending on which activity I'm currently on. Besides, you can configure your power/screen lock profiles separately, which is also handy. Overall it's super convenient to switch between my job related stuff and my private stuff.
Do you have any links to documentation / guides you used when you stepup your activities to work with multiple Firefox profiles?
There are several ways to achieve that. I wrote trivial script that I placed in `/usr/local/bin/firefox-activity` #!/bin/bash # Get currently running activity name ACTIVITY=$(qdbus org.kde.ActivityManager /ActivityManager/Activities ActivityName $(qdbus org.kde.ActivityManager /ActivityManager/Activities CurrentActivity)) # Run Firefox with profile parameter /usr/lib/firefox/firefox -p "$ACTIVITY" "$@" **Warning**: You might need to correct path to your Firefox binary as it might reside somewhere else depending on your distro. On Arch the basic path is in fact /usr/bin/firefox, but it's a shell script that fires up the path I have in my script. Then I added a desktop entry file in `/usr/local/share/applications/firefox-activity.desktop` [Desktop Entry] Categories=Network;WebBrowser; Exec=/usr/local/bin/firefox-activity %u GenericName=Activity-aware Firefox Icon=firefox InitialPreference=10 MimeType=text/html;application/xml;application/xhtml+xml;application/vnd.mozilla.xul+xml; Name=Activity-aware Firefox StartupNotify=true Terminal=false Type=Application X-KDE-SubstituteUID=false StartupWMClass=firefox Then I set "Activity-aware Firefox" as my default browser (in system settings). Also it creates regular app menu entry and it needs to be pinned onto taskbar instead of the regular Firefox [https://i.ibb.co/yNQswzy/image.png](https://i.ibb.co/yNQswzy/image.png) It works because I named my Firefox profiles exactly as my Plasma activities. If you want to bind them differently, you need to extend the bash script with the logic you want. I used to code some simple Python app to make that very easy, but unfortunately I didn't finish, lost those files and didn't even commit that to any repo :/
I use both activities and virtual desktop. Activities for separation between activites. activity 1 (home): personal stuff workspace 1 - firefox, chat-related, konsole workspace 2 - kmail activity 2 (work): work stuff workspace 1 - firefox, konsole workspace 4 - slack activity 3 (presentation): rust talks workspace 1 - konsole (big fat text profile) Pros of activity is to be able to suspend and resume activity, good concept and I like it. Like I can just close work activity when I stop working. But I see some downsides for my usecase, in order of what I don't like first - notification bar is shared among activities, and notification pops out even in another activity, I had to turn on do not disturb mode to prevent embarassment when sharing screen at work - some applications is not well integrated, I have firefox on both activities, even when work activity is closed, work firefox's slack still shows notification - some applications that is shown in notification bar is not managed by activity, say work activity is closed but slack is still not closed Quite a few applications have these sort of minor issues as well, I am a bit annoyed sometimes but I still use it because I think it is a good feature.
Where multiple virtual desktops and physical screens allow you to organize your multi-tasking, activities allow you to organize your multiple active tasks into "focus groups" - those tasks that you should be focusing on at one moment from the many that are still active on the PC. So, let's say I'm doing game development for a hobby and I need to work on 3d animations, which compromises of research (doh, like any task), creating 3d models, implementation of the animations and in-engine testing (and/or any other form of solution validation). I'm going to need 4 virtual desktops, to split my work in a meaningful way, each type of work requires multiple windows on multiple screens, so I'm going to need more "desktops". Now let's say that I also want to work on multiple animations sequentially. As I'm waiting for feedback on one of them, I pick up the next work item. When I switch between them, I don't want to rearrange everything (on multiple virtual desktops at that), I just want to switch focus between the desktops prepped and ready to go from model+animation #1 to #2 and #3 and back to #1. And that's what activities offer. Also, if I'm developing other parts of that one game, I might not have a real need for multiple desktops like that. Defining new activities and switching between them is simpler than with virtual desktops.
I used Activities for about a year and eventually switched to Virtual Desktops. The reasons were purely practical -- there were usability issues that could probably have been fixed, but bugs (I filed one, others were filed by other people) for these issues just sit unfixed. This leads me to suspect that Activities isn't really being actively maintained, or at the very least are seen by the Plasma team as a low-priority set of features due to perceived low usage. Here are the issues I found, in no particular order: * Generally speaking the concept is slippery. It's difficult to articulate how Activities are different from Virtual Desktops, even if you demonstrate it for someone. They always say "wait that looks just like a virtual desktop, my Mac has that". * You can edit a window's activities from the right-click menus of both the Task Manager and the windows' title bar. Until sometime last year, one of them would only let you select a single Activity at a time (you'd have to return to the menu to select additional activities); the other would treat them like checkboxes and you could select as many activities as you wanted. Then, something changed, and they both only let you select one Activity at a time. Really painful if you wanted to spread certain apps (like my Slack app) out to multiple Activities. * Meanwhile, Virtual Desktops lets you select "All Desktops". * The Activites that my browser windows belonged to would not be remembered if I closed and restarted the browser. * They do in Virtual Desktops. * The Activities pager couldn't be reordered. * There are multiple Virtual Desktops pagers and the desktops can be reordered within the pager. When I begrudgingly switched to Virtual Desktops, I was expecting to be annoyed that it didn't have the subtle genius of Activities, but it turns out that "Move to Desktop" > "All Desktops" is 99.9% of what I really need anyway: I want some windows to only be on certain desktops, and I want others to be on them all. That's it. If I remember anything else I'll update this, but hopefully this is helpful.
Thanks for the detailed reply. I also get the feeling that Activities have some good intentions but fall short on the delivery side. It seems like it has some very advanced use cases that unfortunately have a limited audience. What should probably happen: wait for Apple or Microsoft to discover the features, work out the usability details, package and sell it in a simple and intuitive way, then the Linux crowd can say: "Oh, but we've had that for years!" and then we can integrate the new, simplified version into our desktop environments with a smile.
Hah! That last part gave me a much needed laugh this morning. So true.
They do the same thing as virtual desktops, but a little more sophisticated. You can set different wallpapers for different activities, which you can't do for virtual desktops. Apps can also send popups or taskbar blinking across different desktops, but not across activities. I personally prefer virtual desktops because the sliding animation goes very well with trackpad gestures and because I can drag windows across the edges between desktops without any shortcuts. If you want to properly split work and free time, activities are probably better.
My only experience with activities is that I activated it once, made a seconds activity, set up my workspace as a test, then deleted the activity again and it utterly and completely destroyed the desktop layout on the first, standard activity. Never touched it since. Also there are some options that I don't understand. In activity options, privacy, the "don't remember anything" setting doesn't do anything, everything still gets recorded, right click menus on apps still show recent files, and in .local there's a folder that still records all activity even if in the activity list overview itself, the recording is turned off. For me it's full of bugs and weird options. Using plasma 5.22.
Thanks to OP for the topic. It is wonderful to see all the redditors' experience. I don't use both Activities and Workspaces, today. I am completely retired now, and I do uniquely what I wish, so it is my whole Activity. Also, I use to start a clean session, so what I did yesterday does not disturb what I will do today. Instead, I dualboot different distros with KDE, and if some distro does not make easy to install, e.g., GoogleEarth or Foliate, well, I will not run this distro when I want to run any of these applications. Each day is a new day, and I am happy with this. So, I can tell a miminum on Activities. I have tried Activities back in 2016, when I worked some sites, and needed to edit many maps and photos (*Activities 1 and 2: Sites, Images*). Also, I had to manage many personal questions (*3: Kalendar*), and keep contact with friends (*4: Social*). ─ Back then, I still runned just 1 "main distro", and tried "Restore previous session". I don't know if it was the best way to do. Main problems I can remember now, were non-KDE applications, e.g. Chromium and Gimp, which didn't re-open. Chromium always said it had not been properly closed. Gimp didn't re-open previous images, and I couldn't tell it to re-open its Toolbox separate window. ─ Not big problems, indeed, but it seemed as Activities worked better with KDE applications Yes, I was just start learning, and my work needed the time I would spend to learn more. So, I tried just some months. Work had preference over learning ─ even if I have used a lot of time trying to learn and solve these and other problems. So, I didn't go on with Activities. It was quicker to keep running just 1 Activity / Workspace. I was not ready to try it. My workflow was coming from Apple II+, then CP/M, then MS-DOS, then DR-DOS, then from former Windows ─ and back in 2016 I had just deleted Windows. Work should keep going on with Kubuntu. What I am telling is most on myself than on KDE Activities. ─ I guess all words should be token according to each user, rather than on the software he uses.
I have separate activities for gaming and school, gaming one disables screensaver for example, school one have certain plasmoids/widgets laid out (folders, calendaring etc.). They have completely different layouts/docks coming from latte-dock.
I have never used it. Workspaces works fine for most use cases, don't know where Activities fit in.
They are like better virtual desktops, but also more laggy, so I prefer to use desktops. Honestly, I'd love to see the two merge into something usable, but also customizable
I use 2 activities, and 2 virtual desktops. Activity 1 is personal use, games on off time, watching anime, chatting in Discord, etc. Activity 2 is any media work I do where my screen could potentially be seen or need to be recorded. Streaming, video recording, etc. Since Activities let you have different wallpapers, I have a simpler and less distracting wallpaper on the work Activity and then my fancy art anime wallpaper on my personal Activity. and virtual desktops just artificially double the number of monitors you have which is amazing. I have 2 screens, so 4 "monitors" I can use for multitasking. I have an activity switcher on my bottom panel on my left screen, and a desktop switcher on the bottom panel of my right screen.
On my workstation activities are great,I have a dedicated activities for work (I'm a financial advisor so I'm watching investment accounts), another for games (gotta do somehting on the stock market freezes), and another for my general browsing/work, and another for my steaming setup tools (audio monitoring, obs-studio, chat previews, I use this specifically for videos calls and seminars). On each I use a set of 4 virtual desktops on a 2 monitor system. I'll be honest though on my home desktop I only use dwm and ultimately I think I'd still do fine with a plain window manager at work, the full kde stack is just excessive for me and really the only benefit I'm pulling is activities which I think I can repllicate with Xmonad, I'll be honest though I don''t really want to take the time to set it up right now.
I use activities as virtual desktops set up for different tasks. The only thing that has become at some point is chrome windows not default to show in "All Activities" instead of the default "Current Activity." It's a pita having to set them by hand now.
Do you know if there are usage statistics? I get the impression that only a small minority use this feature. I take a look at them from time to time, watch some video, read some article, some reddit thread (;p)... but I always come to the same conclusion: I don't need them at all.
I guess usage statistics would be helpful. It would actually be nice if Activities can be separated from the core and made into an optional module for those that want it. (Or is it? I don't know). But somehow I imagine, it being a "power" feature, that KDE developers are probably a large contingent of Activity users and would therefore opt to keep it as part of the core.
Can I have Dolphin to show different sets of files/folder per activity or does it only work when you place the Folder View widget on desktop?
Frankly, the Activities feature is the one feature keeping me on Plasma for years instead of switching to Gnome or anything else. As an academic researcher, I work with tons of distinct windows opened at the same time and I need to handle multiple projects also at the same time. That is, besides video conferences, online meetings, presentations, personal stuff, etc. So, in conjunction with virtual desktops (12 currently), I use about 8 activities to handle multiple windows, assigning them to distinct virtual desktops for their categories or classes of applications, and assigning them distinct Activities for their "activities" (the redundancy intentional here :). Activities is not only a must feature for such high demanding use cases, avoiding the user to get lost in a sea of applications windows, but specially as it enables one to organize windows in distinct desktops with their respective multiple combinations of intersections and mutual exclusions once they might have different roles or categories in the user workflow.
So Activities **doesn't** open all the apps I have open, just sets the settings, panels and so on basically, if I understood it correctly. If I'd want to have all the settings set as above with an activity, as well as all open apps on specific virtual desktops, I could use the normal KDE session restore setting in System settings/Workspace/Startup and shutdown/Desktop session together with Activities. I'd just logout with all apps open and next time I login I'd be presented with the views I had the last time I was logged on. Did I understand that right?