Discussion for Virtual Desktops and Activities future

[Ivan Čukić]

> Personally i always used virtual desktops exactly for that, as "activities",
> even before activities were a thing, "i need a new physical space to stuff
> new windows" is not an use case that ever occurred to me in any way....
> noted that there are people which see virtual desktops like that.. will have
> to be taken into account somehow, still consider it a pretty crazy use
> case tough.

I'm going to be evil now. Wikipedia definition (not because W is
flawless, but mostly because the 'crazy use case' comment ;)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_desktop
In computing, a virtual desktop is a term used with respect to user
interfaces, usually within the WIMP paradigm, to describe ways in
which the virtual space of a computer's desktop environment is
expanded beyond the physical limits of the screen's display area
through the use of software. This compensates for a limited desktop
area and can also be helpful in reducing clutter.


> Ironically, to me activities never were really able to replace virtual
> desktops as "activities", because its window management part never
> got the love it deserved nad always lookedlike a kinda broken virtual
> desktop implementation, so always falled back to the "multiple
> workspaces" implementation kwin was really built around.. which is
> virtual desktops.

Now, while I agree with this statement, there is an "upside" to the
problematic WM-presentation of activity switching.

Activities are not meant to be switched overly often. In the way that
I see activities, you switch to an activity and work for at least half
an hour. If a project deserves less time to focus on than half an
hour, it is either a one of a kind project, or it does not deserve to
have a dedicated activity.

With this in mind, having a non-pretty switching (though, I did try to
make it prettier to an extent that kwin allows with the following
script https://store.kde.org/p/1110510/) is not a huge problem. But I
agree - it should be prettier.


>> Previously, we had problems when we tried to equate activities with any
>> specific thing. As in, 'an activity is a group of Plasma widgets'. The
>> same will happen if the activity becomes 'a group of windows'.
>>
>> This has been discussed quite a few times before.
>
> mostly because i think the whole concept of activities always was a
> blurry thing, because each one working on them had a different idea
> about them to begin with

This is also the truth - on two levels:
- Everyone in the Plasma team who dipped their toes into activities
had (at least slightly) different visions of what they are, I think
this is the case because of the second level:
- Activities *are* a blurry thing. I've seen so many different
workflows that people created with them.

While I have a clear vision of what activities are, I don't think we
can make them exactly that. The same goes for the vision that anyone
in Plasma team has.

We need to try to make one or two more focused usage patterns more
streamlined, but we can not make them *be* only that.

As an analogy, imagine what would happen if we said 'Dolphin is too
powerful, it allows users to have a really weird filesystem layouts,
lets force them to have 5 directories Pictures, Videos, ...'. Even if
this would fit a significant percentage of our user base, this is not
something that we can do.

We could make the main UI of Dolphin present the files like that while
still allowing normal file management (like most Android file managers
do), but we can not remove the 'powerful when needed' features
altogether.

Cheers,
Ivan

--
KDE, ivan.cukic at kde.org, http://cukic.co/
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