Bug 162900

Summary:	Why are there activities and virtual desktops?
Product:	[Unmaintained] plasma4	Reporter:	Arnout Boelens <a.m.p.boelens>
Component:	general	Assignee:	Plasma Bugs List <plasma-bugs>
Status:	RESOLVED DUPLICATE
Severity:	wishlist	CC:	l.lunak
Priority:	NOR
Version:	unspecified
Target Milestone:	---
Platform:	unspecified
OS:	Linux
Latest Commit:		Version Fixed In:
Sentry Crash Report:

Description Arnout Boelens 2008-05-30 17:16:30 UTC

Version:           4.00.80 (KDE 4.0.80 >= (KDE 4.1 Beta1) (using 4.00.80 (KDE 4.0.80 >= (KDE 4.1 Beta1), Debian packages)
Compiler:          cc
OS:                Linux (i686) release 2.6.24-1-686

I get a bit confused by the fact that there are activities and virtual desktops and the way you navigate between them. For the desktops there is pager and for activities you have to zoom in and out. This does not seem to be very consistent.

Why aren't activities and virtual desktops the same? Having Different virtual desktops with the option to have widgets which are specific to one desktop, or which can show op on all virtual desktops, makes more sense to me.

Other than that, I am enjoying KDE 4.1 a lot!

Cheers,

Arnout

Comment 1 Dennis Nienhüser 2008-06-11 20:53:46 UTC

Activities group related plasmoids together, virtual desktop group related windows. Separating both concepts allows for higher flexibility (less configuration on the user side) when changing the one or the other: You can switch plasmoids and keep the active programs, or the other way round. Using virtual desktops for plasmoids would mean that both programs and plasmoids switch at the same time when you possibly want to change only one of them.

For activity switching I'd expect it to improve wrt consistency and comfort, afaik it's still in the earlier stages.

Comment 2 Aaron J. Seigo 2008-06-13 03:00:50 UTC


*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 37067 ***