Discussion for Virtual Desktops and Activities future

[Roman Gilg]

On Fri, Jul 13, 2018 at 1:54 PM David Edmundson
<david at davidedmundson.co.uk> wrote:
>
> 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:
So the following is not the "happy medium", but what you would be in
favor of? But it looks not like complete unifying.

> * 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.
That makes sense. I would argue there still should be a property on
VDs to inform KWin, if they are not part of the current activity and
therefore should not be switched to when switching through VDs. Also
the pager must know which VDs not to display in the current activity.
But as said this can be a porperty on the VDs and not on the Activity.
>
> * The provider of the list of virtual desktops is ultimately kactivitymanagerd
Why is KAMD the provider? I think KWin should be the provider of all
VDs and KAMD then tells KWin which subset of VDs should be currently
switchable (using the property above) depending on the activity KAMD
has set.
> ----
>
> 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

Sounds like a fine plan on the backend side. VDs and Activites would
then still be available and could be combined arbitrarily. If we go
with that then another topic we should discuss in the future is how to
make the Activity Ui more intuitive to use.