Apparently, though unproven, at 01:08 on Tuesday 28 December 2010, Alex Schuster did opine thusly:
> Alan McKinnon wrote: > > Apparently, though unproven, at 18:35 on Tuesday 30 November 2010, Alex > > > > Schuster did opine thusly: > > > Alan McKinnon writes: > > > > Activities. wtf are those? > > > > > > I tink they are really cool, although I don't use them, and probably > > > never will. But I'm not the average user. I have six virtual desktops > > > (current screenshots are at > > > http://www.wonkology.org/comp/desktop/2010-11-11/ ), each one has its > > > purpose. For each window you can define the desktop it will run on. > > > You change the desktop, and you get new windows displayed, while the > > > plasmoids stay the same. > > > > > > With activities it's the other way around. You switch the activity, and > > > the windows stay the same, but you get different plasmoids. > > > > That's a decent explanation, thanks a lot. I can see how some folks would > > like that and why it's been coded. > > In case you're still interested, this blog entry has some more information > on activities: > > http://chani.wordpress.com/2010/12/26/activity-oriented-vs-application-orie > nted-workspaces/ > > It also covers differences in Gnome's and KDE's approach to this activity > stuff. Good find, it does answer some questions! (especially in the comments). I tend to agree with the long post by user Fri13; to a casual observer my life and desktop looks nicely organized and everything one-to-one mapped to something else. In reality, it's just like everyone else - a mish-mash collection of stuffs that somehow makes sense in my head. So I looked long and hard at this, and found that my desktop is *taskbar- centric* - it's my primary way of organizing things. Apps are spread across 6 virtual desktops in a very ad-hoc style - amarok is on desktop 6 (where it's out of the way), kontact on desktop 2 (where it can be full screen), konsole sticky on the right hand side of all desktops (where I can see it everywhere), and all browsers usually end up on desktop 1 with large numbers of tabs each. Note there's no common method to this madness :-) Like most people, my work is never nicely categorized by Activity - it's too fluid and changeable and too subject to my mood and how I feel today. I also don't like abstracting away the specific app used for a function, I do care whether it's gwenview, okular or digiKam that's loaded an image. They are not mere apps, they are tools, and I'm always aware of what tool I'm using. There's a parallel in the real world - to cut a piece of steel in my workshop I can use any one of several tools and they are NOT interchangeable; to cut a 2" square tube to length I *do* want the angle grinder and not the hacksaw, so I chose the tool myself and do not have it handed to me by some magic selector. Apps are similar, they have their strengths and weaknesses and I usually know which one I want. So now I do understand Activities better. It can be a good idea and I'd like to see some usage experts survey it extensively to make it more obvious how it works. One function that comes to mind which I would use is to return the desktop to a prior state. I often work from home and then want my apps arranged the same way I have them at work. But for now I think I'll just continue the way I always have with a good old Unix virtual desktop setup and KDE session manager. -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
