Let's say you have an activity with some file open in Kate. When closing it while a document isn't saved to disk, Kate will ask for confirmation (do you want to save your changes before closing? dialog). The confirmation dialog prevents the activity from closing, which is fine. However, the activity manager seems to think the activity was closed correctly: * The current activity gets changed * When switching back to the activity, all open applications are started a second time The Plasma UI displays the "half-closed" activity as running. Notice that in the confirmation dialog, the user can choose *not to* close Kate. I don't know how activities could behave in this case.
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Even though the behavior has changed, this is still not handled correctly. Nowadays, the confirmation dialog isn't shown to the user and the app (Kate in the original example) asking for confirmation keeps running. I expect to see the confirmation dialog and only stop the activity if I confirm. I suspect the running app will be killed on logout and the unsaved data will be lost, but I didn't dare to try.
The feature to stop activities is being removed for Plasma 6.5, so this issue won't be encountered anymore.
Great to see some movement on the activities front, thanks you for this! I'm no longer using them since virtual desktops have become enough with multiscreen and increasing RAM. I was thus no longer affected by this issue.
There is indeed a bit of movement; see https://community.kde.org/Sprints/Plasma/2025/Topics/Activities.