KDE Plasma Virtual Desktops and Activities (what's the difference?)

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Жыл бұрын

KDE Plasma version 5 eliminated the feature of allowing different background images per virtual desktop, you are now supposed to do that using Activities but what are Activities and how do they differ from virtual desktops? I try to explain these things here.

Пікірлер: 27

@estevegraells Ай бұрын

Thanks a million Joe, super useful. For newcomers like me: an Activity is a desk, in a desk there are as many monitors as Virtual Desktops you define. Joe describes having a Developer desk for Python, another for Java, and 2 monitors each.

@FzyBear 2 ай бұрын

Great explanations, clear and concise.

@leonardwass8392 4 ай бұрын

What I'd really like to see is how it acts with multiple screens. ie: I currently use Zorin in a way where my primary screen can switch between multiple workspace, but my left and right screen are static and don;t change, no matter which desktop/workspace/activity is on my primary screen. This way I can have things like messengers, system resources, emails, any media I am listening to on the side constantly, no matter which workspace I am in. But I actually love KDE (the company, and all their efforts) and am considering installing the desktop in my Sparky Linux computer (currently using XFCE on there).

@ArtiomNeganov 5 ай бұрын

Thanks! Very clean explanations.

@sebnargeurbrok1374 Жыл бұрын

Thank you, well explained!

@JH-km5nm Жыл бұрын

Thank you for the guide!

@gabrielespinosa.4hpx 11 ай бұрын

Joe Thanks for the video. I have a question, I am trying to get familiar with plasma. I think this activities can be very goog for productivity if it is possible to save the working application in the activity in order to get it ready to work whenever you tourn the computer on. Let's say you have one activity setup for an specific project where you always work with the same software (as your example with python and java programming). As far as i could go in plasma features, i always have to reopen the software i want in each activity. Do you if there is any way it can be saved even after rebooting??

@joelongo2430 11 ай бұрын

There actually IS a way to do what you're looking for (if I understand what you're saying). What you're talking about is saving the "session" Go to System Settings -> "Startup and Shutdown" -> "Desktop session". There you'll see options in the "On Login" section for "Restore previous session", "Restore manually saved session", and "Start with an empty session". If you want to manually save a session before you shutdown make sure "Restore manually saved session" is selected. With this setting when you use the normal leave functionality KDE Menu -> Leave you will see a new option "Save Session". Just save your session there. I hope this helps and this is what you were looking for.

@ilyaportnov181 5 ай бұрын

I just like how people are saying "virtual desktops in linux are like in windows", when windows at last supported them 20+ years after linux did :D

@joelongo2430 5 ай бұрын

OMG I couldn't agree with you more!

@Yupppi 6 ай бұрын

Looks like my KDE plasma is just really buggy and doesn't respond to any edit attempts of pager (virtual desktop icon). Also trying to open a second terminal from latte dock in the second virtual desktop gets pretty weird, it is still connected to the first virtual desktop and instead switches to that desktop.

@SpaceCatKungFu 3 ай бұрын

How do you get the glow on the cursor? I love it!

@joelongo2430 3 ай бұрын

Actually that comes from the screen capture software I used when I created the video. I installed Linux in a VirtualBox VM and was running VirtualBox under Windows and I used NCH Debut to do the screen capture for the video 🙂

@user-dj9kw2xj4m 2 ай бұрын

tldr: activities are a bunch of virtual desktops virtual desktops lets you organise apps into virtual desktops virtual desktop 1 : app1 virtual desktop 2 : app2 virtual desktop 3 : app3 virtual desktop 4 : app4 --- actvities let you organise all virtual desktops into a new superset called activities. activity 1 virtual desktop 1 : app1 virtual desktop 2 : app2 virtual desktop 3 : app3 virtual desktop 4 : app4 activity 2 virtual desktop 1 : app5 virtual desktop 2 : app6 virtual desktop 3 : app7 virtual desktop 4 : app8

@melaniezette886 6 ай бұрын

👍

@ChristianHartmannBerlin 9 ай бұрын

you missed some points: 1. do not track "activity" might ne an essential and very reasonable feature for *private* activities, 2. it is not hust applications, but as you actualy did: widgets and basicly all desktop related settings, (commodore Amiga had a similar concepts with workbenches), Power seetings is such and might does make sence for gaming. although i personally do not use these, it's fair to say, activities are virtual desktops on steroids. it also a reasonable approach to use the one or the other, but not four virtual desktop in two activities. i tend to think of this as an "overkill". (not tried to set different screen resolutions or scaling on diff. activities)

@undefinednull5749 6 ай бұрын

No, actually you are meant to use both. Activities are supersets of the sets (virtual desktops) of apps you have. It is really useful.

@hiru92 9 ай бұрын

after reboot it goes away 🤔

@uroslikar 9 ай бұрын

I don't see any advantages or good use cases to use them

@joelongo2430 9 ай бұрын

I actually kind of agree :-) I was just showing how to use activities but in my day-to-day I tend to just use virtual desktops

@undefinednull5749 6 ай бұрын

Lol, obviously you don't use your pc for much serious work or you are just disorganised? Obviously, the point is that you can have different sets of virtual desktops to do multiple activities in an organised manner. Additionally, using them, you should be able to start off exactly where you left off in an activity without the large burden of restarting. One less obstacle to staying productive.

@hinesfigher6093 10 ай бұрын

Excellent tutorial...but was expecting to see how to set a different background in each desktop.

@joelongo2430 10 ай бұрын

the whole point of it is that you CAN'T! you can only have a different background per activity 😞

@janmussche6815 2 ай бұрын

With all the python programming in between you still didn't make clear what are Activities and how they differ from virtual desktops.

@i_hate_this_world 2 ай бұрын

I actually found this very clear. What I got from it was that Activities are a collection of Virtual Desktops. You can then organise your virtual desktops into discreet containers for different activities. Eg. You can have an activity for work which might have 3 virtual desktops - one for your email client, one for your word processor and one for your calendar. You can then have another Activity for gaming with maybe 2 virtual desktops, one with a web browser and one with a collection of shortcuts to your games. etc etc Whether I'll actually find a use for this, I don't know, but I like the idea and I thought the video explained it well.

@davidwayne9982 2 ай бұрын

that is all STUPID and a waste. IT worked MUCH better when they had BISMUTH TILING--- you could see all of it at once- and didn't have to worry about all that crap. Also NO ONE needs that many spaces open at the same time since you can only reallly work in ONE at a time. It's just all stupid.