Discussion for Virtual Desktops and Activities future

[Nate Graham]

 ---- On Fri, 13 Jul 2018 08:22:31 -0700 Ivan Čukić <ivan.cukic at kde.org> wrote ---- 
 > 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) 

Hmm, just on first glance I'm not a huge fan of this. It seems like it would just replace confusion over two similar-but-slightly-different concepts that have their own user interfaces with confusion over two other similar-but-slightly-different concepts that have their own user interfaces.

Instead, perhaps we can help out the Group C users by leveraging an existing feature of our Virtual Desktop implementation: the ability to have not just a flat list of Virtual Desktops, but rather a two-dimensional array of them. Users who currently use both multiple Activities and multiple Virtual Desktops could use the columns to approximate Activities, and the rows within each column as actual Virtual Desktops. Here's an example:

Status quo
==========

Activity 1: work
- Virtual Desktop 1: Web browser and IDE
- Virtual Desktop 2: Email and chat apps

Activity 2: home
- Virtual Desktop 1: Web browser and music player
- Virtual Desktop 2: IRC and Telegram


Proposed new workflow
=====================

 Work "stack"         Home "stack"
|------------|       |------------|
|    VD 1    |       |    VD 3    |
| Web browser|       | Web browser|
|     IDE    |       |Music player|
|------------|       |------------|

|------------|       |------------|
|    VD 2    |       |    VD 4    |
|    Email   |       |Konversation|
|    chat    |       |  Telegram  |
|------------|       |------------|

With a user interface that explicitly supports and encourages this sort of thing (e.g. the ability to apply current activity-specific features such to multiple Virtual Desktops; "next" and "previous" keyboard shortcuts automatically bound to the top row of each column), it might be sufficient.

Nate