RFC: Activities vs Virtual Desktop document on the wiki

[Marco Martin]

On Saturday 16 June 2012, Aurélien Gâteau wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> One of the output of the KDE Vision sprint is a document I started to write
> to define activities and how they relate to virtual desktops. You can find
> it here:
> http://community.kde.org/Plasma/Workspace_Sprint/ActivitiesAndVirtualDeskt
> ops

This comes out of probably some views that are being adjusted over time:
the old idea was to keep activities and virtual desktops as orhogonal 
functions:
activities is about separing tasks by well.. activity, while virtual desktops 
becomes intended as a purely spatial organization of windows (just poor man 
multimonitor)

now, since virtual desktops can also be used as a (very, very) primitive 
version of activities (separing windows as activities) are very often seen as 
overlapping concepts, therefore confusing.

I would like to keep this definition of orthogonality between activities and 
virtual desktops in the definition, describing use cases for
a) separation by activity
b) spatial organization
then describe how b) is coveed by activities.
If a) is something that should stay in the long years to come, is an open 
question.

I clearly see (and clearly came out from the Tree game) that in the end in the 
practical use VDs and Activities often end up overlapping.
Also virtual desktops are so limited by x11 and netwm tecnicalities that may 
become a slowly fading away legacy.

> If you are involved in activities can you review it? If it makes sense I'll
> move it to /Plasma/ActivitiesAndVirtualDesktops and link to it from
> /Plasma.

I think it still needs a bit of work before, but should definitely end up 
there in the end.

Cheers,
Marco Martin