some thoughts on virtual desktops

[Thomas Olsen]

On 5/11-2009 17:52 Lubos Lunak <l.lunak at suse.cz> wrote:
> 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.

I've only a from short time ago been able to use compositing (or rather 
figuring out how to make it work with my crappy Intel drivers) but now I'm 
happy for being able to use some of the bells'n'whistles. 
With regard to activities, virtual desktops and wallpapers it seems to me that 
*this* is an important place to actually limit the choices (ducking). I'm 
still on KDE 4.3.2 so I don't really know the progress of the post-ZUI era - 
at least I hope that's whats happening, but for me it has been and still is 
impossible to create a workplace where desktops, activities and wallpapers are 
tied together.
I think that the possibility of having different activities for each virtual 
desktop that could lead to N-desktops * N-activities will seriously confuse 
everyone except the few people who designed it.
Pretty please: Tie desktops, wallpapers and activities together. Actually for 
an end user perspective let there be no difference between a virtual desktop 
and an activity.
Then for the .0001 per cent of users wanting to customize it even more they 
could do it by editing config files or even the source code.

Forgive me for drifting a tad away from the topic of the original post and 
maybe misunderstanding the topic all together.

-- 
Best Regards / Med venlig hilsen

  Thomas Olsen