Activities (problems & proposals)

[Ivan Čukić]

Hi,

I'll reply to both your and Martin's mail.

First of all, thanks for the ideas. Glad someone uses activities that much.


> 1. Remember what apps are set to be shown in all activities. I always use
> apps like Telegram and my music player in all activities, and I have to set
> this way too often.

You can set the application/window rules for specific applications or windows
to always be shown on a certain activity. I know that that application/window 
rules configuration is not that intuitive (even if it was redesigned recently), 
but I don't think we can 'remember activities' by default.

I'd say that any chosen default behaviour (including the current one) is going 
to annoy somebody. This is a common problem with abstract features like
activities that people can use in wildly different ways.


> 2. Some apps can only have one instance open. This should change to one
> instance for activity. E.g.: opening system settings in activity X should
> not make me switch to activity Y where I had it open already.

I totally agree. I'm assuming that people who develop those applications
don't use activities. And that developers that use activities don't use those
applications.


> 3. When clicking links, the new tab will be opened in any open session
> found, even if it's in another activity. Instead - if I don't have firefox
> open in one activity - I'd like the tab to open up in a new window, in the
> same activity.

Same as the above, but even more difficult. While we could probably patch
KDE applications to behave well, FF doesn't care about single-platform
features.


> 4. When you restart kwin, all applications are thrown back into one
> activity regardless of where they were. This leads to frustration.

I agree with this one as well. We need to fix that bug. While kwin crashes
rarely, every time it does, it messes up everything.


> 5. When I have window X set to be shown in all activities, and window X
> spawns window Y, the latter will not be set to be shown in all activities
> but only the activity I opened window X in. Easy way to replicate it: open
> telegram, set it to all activities, change activity, click on any image.

Hm... this is also an issue we should handle. Not sure it is possible to 
handle this reliably, but we can try.


> 6. Sometimes apps in activities I stop pop up in the next activity I
> open.
> 
> 7. Many third party apps are not restored in the correct activities when
> I boot up

All the start/stop issues of activities are ancient and irreparable 
unfortunately. This is one of the activity features I honestly hate.
When it was implemented, it was a hack around the X11 session
management protocol which was never meant to handle anything
like this. The implementation went as far is was possible and got
merged into KWin even if we knew it was buggy and that it will need
to stay buggy.

And it is a useful feature that we can not remove.


> 8. The animation from a activity to another is a slide in of the new
> activity wallpaper over a black screen. It doesn't make sense to have an
> animation that starts with a completely black screen. Either the animation

I agree. Don't know when this started happening - when the animation
was created, it was a slide from one wallpaper to another.

> 9. Activity sidebar get stuck open.

Yes, that is a known issue from one of the previous Plasma releases.


> 10. No clear shortcut to open activity sidebar.

Meta+q (win+q)

Not the nicest shortcut, but q is next to Tab which is used to cycle through
activities.


> 11. The activities list widget breaks when you move anything in the

This applet could use some love, true.


> click on desktop > show activities switcher > try to drag from TM to
> sidebar (sidebar accidentally closes way too often)

Can you post a video of this somewhere? It works for me nicely.


> 14. It takes quite a bit of time to create a new activity and set it up:
> requires writing a name, choosing an icon in a very unintuitive way,
> possibly change the wallpaper etc otherwise they end up looking the same
> and it's difficult to distinguish which activity you are in.

Do you have a suggestion on how to improve this? The icon is the standard
KDE's icon picker.


> 15. It is a bit difficult to switch to a precise activity (unless you
> have the activities pager): it's either right click on desktop > activity
> switcher > click on activity or meta-tabbing until the correct one appears.

I'd say that the default click applet+click activity is sufficient for most
users. For people who need to switch activities more often and with
fewer clicks, there are the activities pager you mentioned and the keyboard
shortcuts.


> 16. It is also difficult to stop an activity, as per above. Although
> stopping activities could benefit the user, opening the activity switcher
> and hovering on the right activity is an action too annoying to do every
> time, so the users ends up ignoring that.

With the issues of start/stop, I actually like most users ignoring this.


>    A new widget that
> 
>    a) Displays all user activities and up to four app for each one (after
> which the list becomes scrollable or visible on hover)

Can you provide a mockup of this?


> f) Hovering on activity icon would expose its name on a tooltip, and
> hovering an app would show its title in a tooltip

Just in the case this is not known - for the default activity applet, you can
configure it to show the current activity icon and name in the panel (if it is 
a horizontal panel).


>    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,

Don't count on this. People thought that even a single icon is too much to
show by default.


Martin wrote:
> The window menu approach is quite awkward. I wonder whether dragging
> a window onto the widget which then would open a sidebar with all 

Dragging the window was not possible so the dragging from task manager to
the applet was introduced. But, it seems to have problems for Niccolo.


Cheers,
Ivan

-- 
dr Ivan Čukić
ivan at cukic.co, https://cukic.co/
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