Discussion for Virtual Desktops and Activities future

[Ivan Čukić]

> I think this is a fair recap so far:

The recap sounds great. 

> When Martin and I started talking about the
> Wayland protocol, we
> were keen to do work that would reusable 
> for either use case. This

I especially like this part. As I said, merging the implementation (at least to some extent) is a great idea.


> I think it's a reality that we have users who
> use both together, [...]

Yes, we have users that do that, we have users that only use one or the other, and we have users that don't use either.

It is the same with any more advanced feature we have. We give users the choice, and the users are smart enough to pick what they need.

We have several launchers, some use multiple ones, some a single one, and some don't use a launcher.

> It's also reality that we have critics who
> complain the two are
> redundant and it's all a big mess.

This part I don't care about. I care about users, not critics. Trolls will always find something to complain about.

> It's not a surprise to me that the idea of 
> merging them has come up,

I'm not surprised either, the same idea has been popping up every few years.

The problem with it is that the proposals are usually about modelling a particular person's view of activities. 

> It does mean
> being willing to take some people's existing 
> workflows away, though.

I'm not willing. It goes against Plasma design principle of 'simple by default, powerful when needed'.

I'm all for designing a new UI for all of this (though I'd like to see it based on the current one which I find quite pretty :) ) which would communicate clearly what activities are for and what VDs are for.

> I also think merging has technical risks, e.g. 

Not only the speed. It would also make problems for the Plasma - the current activities design is quite baked in the underlying organisation of the shell. What would this change require, and how would it handle different behaviours on X11 and Wayland which was mentioned in Phab.

> e.g. the VDG's
> mulled Activity overview/dashboard thingie.

This thing https://cukic.co/2014/07/01/just-a-teaser/ ?

Cheers,
Eike