plasmoid: why does it exist?

[B.W.H. van Beest]

Thank you for your explanation. The KDE version I use is 4.4 indeed.
While my main computer still runs KDE 3.5, I have tried every KDE 4.X
release..
So far I have rejected all of them, as being too immature to do serious
work.
And too unintuitive.
Too many pseudo-nice things that didn't work as one should expect.

4.4 seems to be the first one that is what you may expect.
I tried to upgrade to 4.5. but that one failed, probably because I did
not upgrade enough.
I will now wait until 4.5 is offered to me via the regular (openSuse)
update repository.

You guessed right that 'activities' are another of those unknown and
unintuitive concepts that the KDE 4 introduced. I still understand them.
But, to give this lamentory a positive swing: I was afraid that KDE4
became the Vista of linux, but I am glad that KDE is finally getting there.

Regards,
Bertwim

On 09/04/2010 01:51 AM, Duncan wrote:
> B.W.H. van Beest posted on Fri, 03 Sep 2010 23:59:49 +0200 as excerpted:
>
>   
>> Can somebody explain to me what is the use of this plasmoid thing? All I
>> want is to have different desktops, with different backgrounds. Well,
>> that is possible, but when do I have to deal with the plasmoid, whatever
>> it is?
>> I feel that I'm missing the point in the kde4 desktop phlosopy.
>>     
> A plasmoid is simply a widget on the plasma desktop or in a panel.  There 
> are all sorts of plasmoids.  The kickoff menu is a plasmoid.  The lancelot 
> alternative menu is a different plasmoid.  So is the classic menu.
>
> So is the clock, and the system tray, and the folder-view, and any other 
> widget you have or can add to the desktop or panels.
>
> Meanwhile, I think what you're after is activities.  Each activity has its 
> own desktop widgets, and you can switch activities like you would switch 
> desktops.  You don't mention what version of kde4 you have, but from I 
> believe the 4.4 series, and certainly 4.5 if not 4.4, you can link each 
> virtual desktop with its own activity, so each desktop gets its own 
> background and set of plasmoids.
>
> The 4.4 series used a zoom interface that was hard for a lot of folks to 
> get.  I believe in 4.4, the option to link activities with desktops was 
> there, when the activities were zoomed out.  They reworked that with 4.5, 
> which now has a checkbox in the virtual desktop kcm (kcontrol module) in 
> kcontrol (wrongly aka system settings, as it's generally user specific and 
> kde specific settings, so the kde3 name, kcontrol, was more accurate, and 
> more googlable as well), "Different widgets for each desktop", which would 
> again, associate a separate activity, and therefore its own background and 
> plasmoids, with each desktop.
>
>   
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