Discussion for Virtual Desktops and Activities future

[Ivan Čukić]

David> Are you (Michail and Ivan) at Akademy?

Not this year, I'm taking a rest from socializing ;)

Nate> very different things: Virtual Desktops are for window organization
Nate> within the current set of tasks, and Activities are for higher-level

This is exactly my view of VD vs activities.

Nate> both have similar animated transitions; one has an accessible user
Nate> interface and a keyboard shortcut but the other one doesn't; one can

Can you elaborate? With transitions, you mean
plasma-widgets-and-wallpaper-slide in activities vs windows-slide
transition with VDs?

That is the only similarity between the UIs as far as I see.

> I'm willing to experiment with combining them to improve the user

Experimenting is good. I'd love to see a unified UI that would make
activities and VDs 'obvious' while still being good for
only-activities or only-vd setups.

We had an experiment (and a full implementation) back in the 5.1 days
[1] that was meant to provide a nicer UI for activity handling (which
might have confused people regarding VD relation to activities even
more :) ). But the ideas we had to add VD support to it were quite
problematic. The UI was quite busy as it was.

Since then, I got a bit disillusioned wrt the unified UI idea, and I'm
currently leaning more to an activity UI that is document-focused
(favorites, recents, ...) instead of the window-focused one.

But I haven't come up yet with anything that looks manageable.

Michail>

Backend-wise, B1 sounds like a great idea. I see not technical reason
why it would need to be either-or. If a window can have a list of VDs
assigned, that list might contain activities as well. The matching
would be as simple as 'current VD is in the list' && 'current activity
is in the list'.

Or, everything could share the same code, while there would be two
separate lists (this would be cleaner IMO).

Cheers,
Ivan

[1] https://youtu.be/uxaDaXW67Oo?t=41s

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