some thoughts on virtual desktops

[Lubos Lunak]

On Wednesday 28 of October 2009, Chani wrote:
> this email meandered from plasma to kwin, so I'm crossposting. remember to
> keep both lists in replies please :)
>
> so I was thinking a bit about virtual desktops and wallpaper n'stuff.
> it seems to me that the majority of people using the per-virtual-desktop
> feature are really only interested in the per-desktop wallpaper part of it.
> (do correct me if I'm wrong about that :)
>
> now, ignoring for a moment the people who do want activities tied to
> virtual desktops... the ones who want different walpaper, I only really see
> two reasons they want it:
>
> 1) to easily identify which desktop they're on or which desktop they want
> to be on (a big colourful picture requires *much* less thought than text.
> heck, just removing the colours from window icons in alt-tab has made me
> have to think a lot more)
> 2) pretty shiny desktop-cube effect

 You are not required to have just one TYPE_DESKTOP window forced to be on all 
desktops, it should be possible to create one TYPE_DESKTOP window per each 
desktop. The WM spec is not explicit on this, so maybe other WMs may have a 
slight problem with this, but if there is a problem with KWin, it can be 
considered a bug. That should make this a Plasma-only problem :).

 And you'd still have to somehow try to make various Plasmoids show in the 
right windows, and it would be nice if this didn't eat resources when not in 
composited mode or when a uniform wallpaper is set.

-- 
Lubos Lunak
KDE developer
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