RFC: Activities vs Virtual Desktop document on the wiki

[Luiz Romário Santana Rios]

A Sábado 16 Junho 2012 14:21:39 Marco Martin escreveu:
> 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)
Just my 2 cents, but I think that the virtual desktops would make more sense 
as a complement to activities than they do simply being orthogonal. A good 
comparison, just to illustrate my point, could be made between 
activities/desktops and KDevelop: the activity would be like a KDevelop 
session, as they are both intended for working with one or more correlated 
tasks; and the desktop would be like a KDevelop working set, as they both 
separate different subtasks of a same task.

> 
> 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
> _______________________________________________
> Plasma-devel mailing list
> Plasma-devel at kde.org
> https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/plasma-devel