Re: KDE activities

[Martin Steigerwald <Martin@lichtvoll.de>]

Hi Alan!

Am Sonntag, 27. November 2011 schrieb Alan Chandler:
> With the problems I seem to be having with Gnome3 (not the problem that
[…]
> ...) I decided to give KDE 4 another try (I had switched to Gnome from
> KDE when KDE 4 was first introduced).
> 
> I am struggling with the concepts behind Activities, Desktops,
> Workspaces and Screens.  This is not helped by the fact that I am
[…]
> In particular - I use Super Q to bring up the activities manager pane.
> This shows I have two activities both named "New Activity".  I should
> then right click on a desktop and select "Desktop Settings" I should
> see a window with the left pane having three options "Wallpaper",
> "Activity" and "Mouse Actions".  Instead I see a window with only two
> options, "View" and "Mouse Actions".
> 
> Have I not installed something I should have? or has this changed and
> all these web pages are out of date?

You are not alone. Activities are something that have been changed a lot 
during KDE 4 lifetime. I think they first appeared in KDE 4.2 or so and 
have been rather inconsistent there. They gotten way better with KDE 4.6.5 
and even better with the brand new KDE 4.7.2 amd64 packages from 
yesterday¹.

So what KDE version are you using?

I don´t know where you read about the three panes. I only have the two you 
mentioned, but as that, activities have been changed a lot. Maybe that 
source refers to an earlier version of KDE 4.

Its a bit difficult to grasp the concepts and differences between virtual 
desktops versus activies. I found the excellent blog of Chani, who 
develops on KDE activities as well, very help ful in understand 
activities. For example:

{December 26, 2010}   Activity-oriented vs Application-oriented workspaces
http://chani.wordpress.com/

were she describes the differences between GNOME 3 and KDE in that regard 
or her screen casts like

{December 18, 2010}   Activities 4.6 screencast
http://chani.wordpress.com/2010/12/18/activities-4-6-screencast/

or

{January 9, 2011}   Activities in Action 
http://chani.wordpress.com/category/activities/


I also darkly remember a blog entry of her or someone else that explains 
the difference between activities and virtual desktops in a really clear 
way. Lets see whether I find that one. Ok, it might have been that one:

The Rise of Plasma Activities and What it can do for You
http://yuenhoe.com/blog/2011/01/the-rise-of-plasma-activities-and-what-it-
can-do-for-you/

of Jason "moofang" Lim Yuen Hoe.

Yes, thats it.

I found it through

Activities – A change in workflow?
http://hanschen.org/2011/02/04/activities-a-change-in-workflow/

which also seems to be a good read.

I suggest you, to read these and watch some screencasts by Chani. And when 
there are still questions, ask them then. That said, I am still into 
exploring this new concept myself.

I have several activities:

- communication
  - KMail
  - Kontact
  - Chat stuff
- system administration
  - Konsole
  - Some system meter plasmoids like CPU and free memory
    - First use case of myself for rotating plasmoids
    - I have them rotated by 90 degrees ;)
    - Before I never understand why this could be a useful feature ;)
- photos
  - Quicklinks to Digikam, Gwenview
  - image plasmoids with photos from my gf and other nice photos
    - Second use case for rotating plasmoids
- files
  - I am wondering, whether this is too generic of an activity
  - I do lots of stuff with files, maybe I split into different activities
- information
  - Weather plasmoid
  - Comic plasmoid with space picture of the day and some comics
  - Akregator
  - Web browsers like Rekonq, Konqueror, Iceweasel
  - thats to fuzzy as well, maybe at least split into fun and information
  - lets see
- gaming
  - quick links to popular games
  - probably a Konsole for compiling Freedroid RPG from SVN and such

not all of them are started at any time although since switching to my new 
company laptop - an ThinkPad T520 with 8 GB of RAM - this wouldn´t be much 
of a resource problem.

I am still wondering about my activities, the categorization of stuff into 
activities. Especially for files and information which seem to generic to 
me.

[1] http://qt-kde.debian.net/

Thanks,
-- 
Martin 'Helios' Steigerwald - http://www.Lichtvoll.de
GPG: 03B0 0D6C 0040 0710 4AFA  B82F 991B EAAC A599 84C7