Discussion for Virtual Desktops and Activities future

David Edmundson david at davidedmundson.co.uk
Fri Jul 13 12:54:02 BST 2018


Whilst personally I am in favour of just completely unifying, I think
there's an option that might be a happy medium.

---

If we were to unify, we would do the following:

* Windows are not directly associated with activities

* Windows are on N virtual desktops

* Kwin and plasmashell taskamanager/pagers only speak virtual desktops.
References to both VDs and activities in the UI are reduced to 1 list.

* The provider of the list of virtual desktops is ultimately
kactivitymanagerd

----

There's nothing there that forces 1 activity == 1 desktop.
Instead we can associate desktops with activities.

i.e Kactivitymanagerd with 2 activities, that wanted 2 desktops on each
activity it could choose to create 4 desktops named:

work - 1
work - 2
browsing - 1
browsing - 2

With KAMD only switching the DBus currentActivity when switching between
the first two desktops to the last two.

We remove all the overlap in the UI. Plasma+KWin code still get /massively/
simplified. A user can still have multiple desktops associated with the
same activity for correct stats/tagging. Shortcuts to change activity will
go to KAMD instead of kwin, which can then tell kwin to go to an explicit
desktop.

There will be some behavioural changes to the current state, but I don't
think there would be any actual regressions.

David
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