Discussion for Virtual Desktops and Activities future

[Ivan Čukić]

@David

Regarding the backend (wherever the actual logic ends up in - kwin or
kamd), your idea does sound nice. It would also provide the ability
that some of the 'C' category users wanted - to have variable number
of VDs per activity.

But the problem is not primarily how to handle the 'unification'
implementation-wise, but UI-wise. UI is what we primarily need to be
concerned with.

One potential UI approach that came to me, which might be able to
cover all categories of users and which would fit David's proposal, is
the following,:

- Activities and VDs get mostly merged. The current activity switcher
+ VD animations end up there (with some improvements).

- Window organization part of VDs gets changed into "window groups" or
"window sets" where the windows can be grouped together. Switching the
groups could use the same effect as minimize/restore, but with a group
of windows. Or something along those lines.

This would provide the more obvious distinction - "groups" are for
window management and "activities" are about providing different
workspaces. "groups" would be volatile in the sense that their number
can vary a lot - quick creation, automatic destruction etc. (like
activities in gnome shell)

Now, this would require *a lot* of work, and while supporting all the
use-cases for activities/VDs I know of, it would change workflows of
many users.

OTOH, these components would need significant **coordinated** changes:
- Task manager
- Pager
- Activity-related applets
- KWin
- KWin rules (we still need to be able that certain applications need
to be always in same 'group')
- Plasma

And I'm not sure we could have a slow roll-out of the features across
several releases. This would need to be done all at once.

Cheers,
Ivan