Activities (problems & proposals)

[Martin Steigerwald]

Hi Niccolo.

Thanks for your suggestions. I actually use activities.

Currently I use a hidden bar at the top which have the activity widget 
that opens the activity management side bar and it also ("Aktivitäten") 
chas the current activities in a kind of a bar next to one another 
("Aktivitätenleiste"). That works well enough for me most of the time.

niccolo - 10.10.20, 19:44:22 CEST:
>    I've been using activities for a bit and I think they are a cool
> concept, but they have some problems. I was suggested by d_ed to make
> a coherent list of my problems; I also took a bit of time to think if
> there was anything I could do to help. I thus have also a proposal to
> make Activities better. First, the list of bugs I found:
[…]
>    4. When you restart kwin, all applications are thrown back into one
> activity regardless of where they were. This leads to frustration.

This is a long standing bug:

forgets which windows belong to which activities in certain 
circumstances

https://bugs.kde.org/372879

Quite a while I had kwin_x11 crashes probably related to running two X11 
sessions side by side. During that time this has been very annoying. 
Nowadays kwin_x11 runs very stable on my system, so this is less of an 
issue for me.

>    7. Many third party apps are not restored in the correct activities
> when I boot up.

Maybe this one is somehow related to the bug above.

>    This widget could be shipped by default between kickoff and TM. It
> would take almost no space by default, since there would only be the
> default activity and a + button. There would also be a ? button that,
> when pressed, opens a dialog that explain how activities work and
> then offers an easy way to remove the activities widget if the user
> does not want it.

I quite like some things about your widget idea.

I'd appreciate an easier way to move a window to a different activity. 
The window menu approach is quite awkward. I wonder whether dragging a 
window onto the widget which then would open a sidebar with all 
activities and you drop it on the activity you like would work nice. 
Similar to how you drag mails in KMail or files in Dolphin where is opens 
folders automatically for you to drop the mail or file into.

Another approach would be to have something like Alt-Tab to cycle a 
window through activities. Could be challenging to find a shortcut for 
that which is not already used. But I'd really like that. It would just 
move the currently active window… hmmm or maybe the windows of the app 
which to which the currently active window belongs to the activity where 
I stop pressing the shortcut.

>    I think such a widget would make it much, much easier and likeable
> for users to use activities. It mimics materia shell management of
> activities, which seem to be quite appreciated.

I use activities, cause it really works better for me than mutiple 
desktops with a multi monitor setup. I just switch to a different 
activity 

Thanks,
-- 
Martin