Discussion for Virtual Desktops and Activities future

[Marco Martin]

On Wed, Jul 4, 2018 at 9:12 PM Nate Graham <pointedstick at zoho.com> wrote:
> very different things: Virtual Desktops are for window organization
> within the current set of tasks, and Activities are for higher-level
> task and context switching.

which is.. a pretty blurry concept, it asks the question "which of the
two i should use now" which is a mental step too much...

that said, i guess it's pretty obvious that the "traditional virtual
desktop mode" is still needed optional, (it's all we can deliver for
4.14 anyways) in that case activities would stay independent.. but
lose all their window management related features.

>
> Both concepts have merit and are useful, but it's true that the current
> user interfaces for them are rather confusing for a variety of reasons:
> both have similar animated transitions; one has an accessible user
> interface and a keyboard shortcut but the other one doesn't; one can
> have different wallpapers but the other one can't; etc.
>
> I'm willing to experiment with combining them to improve the user
> interface, but I think it's important to keep in mind the different
> reasons *why* people use one or the other (or both), and fluidly support
> all of those use cases without losing any current functionality. So for
> example:
>
> - You should be able to mark a Virtual Desktop as "private"
> - Virtual Desktops should be able to have different wallpapers, panel
> settings, recent documents lists, etc.
all 3 things depend exclusively on activites

> - I'd like to see a visible-by-default method to switch between Virtual
> Desktops, plus appropriate keyboard shortcuts
the pager is visible if there were 2 desktop by default, an always
visible way to add a desktop may be nice, often want to have that, but
don't know what wouldn't be "too invasive" (like an always visible
icon in the panel would be)

keyboard shortcuts are there (ctrl f1-f4, tough would be meta tab for
everybody if get merged)

> In addition to alleviating potential user confusion, combining them
> while keeping current functionality may yield a PR advantage since it
> would represent an opportunity to shift the narrative from "KDE has two
> confusing versions of Virtual Desktops that nobody understands" to "KDE
> Has the best, most feature-filled Virtual Desktops implementation!"

yeah, to me that's why activities never were really used much, all
their beautiful advanced features were hidden behind the idea of "they
are kinda broken virtual desktops" which is not true, but i'm pretty
that is the perception
And there would be quite a nice opportunity for a nice pr campaign.

--
Marco Martin