I’m using Activities as beefed up workspaces to better separate personal stuff and work stuff. And to have different icons and wallpapers. It can be handy and useful on a psychological level imo to have a work activity where I just stick to work and have my work tools in favourities and taskbar and when I’m taking a break or stopping for the day, I can easily switch to free time activity. And I can seamlessly jump between the two and stop what I’m doing and leave everything open without crowding the taskbar or something.
So consider this blog post notice that the feature is at risk of being eventually removed if people don’t step up to contribute technical work to either fix existing bugs, or else overhauling the feature to work differently.
I’d be sad to see it removed completely. I hope they keep it, even if it is left to that “power user” niche.
Personally, I’d like to see Activities morph into a feature whereby each activity has a separate set of settings and config data, but access to all the same user files. On top of that, you would be able to configure individual apps you use in multiple activities (like music players) to use shared settings and config data.This way it would basically be the “profiles” feature that many web browsers have now, but applied automatically to any and all apps you want.
I hope it sticks around and is refined further. I started using KDE maybe six months back, after not having touched it in probably 10ish years. Back then I hated KDE but now it’s absolutely my favorite DE. Having regularly used virtual desktops before my switch to KDE, activities are a pretty big part of what I’m loving about the experience. The feature can be clunky in certain ways (mainly moving apps between activities), and I’d love to see further refinement, but even at its current state of implementation it helps so much with my own workflow.
At the moment I run 6 activities: “Default” which generally has a web browser open to my Proxmox servers’ web panel, as well as a terminal, “Gaming”, “Media”, Work (Primary), Work (Secondary), and then “Other” for random crap that doesn’t fit any of the main activities. I have hotkeys set up to easily switch between them, and each taskbar has different pinned apps.
Unfortunately I’m not really a coder so I can’t contribute directly to maintaining it but I do hope the feature is either refined or merged into virtual desktops in a way that keeps its core benefits.
Exactly (at least in my experience). I have my gaming apps pinned in my gaming activity, and my work apps in my work activities. The only annoyance there is when certain apps open in the “wrong” activity. For instance, I pretty much always have the Kate text editor up in my gaming activity because I play games with a million mods and constantly have to fix things. Because of that, when I need Kate for work it’ll tend to open an instance in the gaming activity and I have to move it in the clunky way stuff gets moved between activities.
I know it has it, but at least for me I find activities to be more beneficial. I really like being able to customize them for each purpose. I’m also not sure if you can set custom hotkeys to go to a specific virtual desktop like you can with activities.
Obviously if activities get removed from KDE I’ll go back to using virtual desktops but until then I’ll make the most of them.
I finally found my use case for activities - switching between work and personal stuff. Having virtual desktops isn’t enough to separate the two for me, but activities does the job really well. Would miss the feature if it goes the way of the Dodo in the future.
I get into phases where I use Activities, and I like the workflow, but then I forget about it for a while. I like having the separated workspace with no other thing showing up in the taskbar, but moving applications between the activities is a pain.
I’d like to see it stay but I don’t have the knowledge to maintain it, so I guess I’m at the mercy of the KDE team’s willingness to keep it on life support.
@ikidd@leopold
I use 4 work spaces & organize by my own system/categories as I start opening stuff after a weekly restart, a couple of vivaldi instances, firefox all with their own email & download locations
No special setup beyond me remembering my own scheme, easy to move stuff between work spaces
Activities do a lot more. Virtual desktops are purely a window management feature. They contain windows and very little else. Activities can have different, panels, wallpapers, desktop icons, etc.
The way I explain it is that it’s virtual desktops that you can start and stop at will and run scripts when doing that as well as switching to and from activities. It also has different shortcuts like this other guy said
I remember trying just about every GUI calculator I could find and trying to get one I could actually tolerate. Any calculator which pointlessly hid what you’d written from you every time you added an operator like KCalc did was automatically out, which disqualified a surprisingly and disappointingly large amount of calculators. Any calculator without a standard skeuomorphic interface was also out, because I didn’t feel like relearning how to use a calculator.
I used GNOME calculator for a while, but switched away because I found the interface for programmer mode to be hella confusing when I really just wanted to have hexadecimal and binary modes. I also used Uno Calculator for a while, a direct port of the Windows 10 calculator, but the port was a bit rough and fonts didn’t work so well, otherwise it would’ve been perfect. I finally settled on Deepin Calculator. A bit basic and completely unthemable beyond switching between dark and light themes, but it was very easy to use and had all the functionality I needed. I can’t for the life of me remember why I didn’t just go with Qalculate!. I know for a fact I tried it and it seems like it would’ve been perfect. I’ll probably just be using KCalc from now on, tho.
Especially under load, KDE is a freezing mess. Copying back a backup (under 100GB) and I literally cannot move my cursor.
Meanwhile crashing programs make the shell unresponsive too. Like, there is no seperation?
The performance issues literally are so bad I considered moving back to Windows. Or GNOME with some Zorin/Oeron shell modifications. Probably GNOME, but many apps are unusable and they have no fractional scaling??
I am looking so much forward to cosmic, even though I dont see at all how it should be a complete desktop soon. But Wayland only, written in Rust, from scratch exactly for the modern use case… its awesome!
Like, KDE will never be memory safe, they are bound to Qt.
Yeah, Plasma isn’t great under heavy IO and as far as I can tell that’s not really getting fixed in Plasma 6. It’s one of the biggest problems I have with it right now. On faster storage it’s not really a problem, especially on SSDs, but on slower storage it can definitely be. I would recommend trying a different desktop.
GNOME is generally heavier than Plasma, but might indeed perform better in the scenario. You don’t have to use GNOME with GNOME applications if you don’t like them. You can easily use GNOME Shell and Plasma applications. There other desktops worth a try outside of GNOME and Plasma, tho. LXQt should be very fast. Enlightenment even more so.
Also, I don’t think memory safety is among KDE’s biggest concerns. Qt afaik handles a lot of the memory management and it is a professional toolkit which has received a lot of testing. It shouldn’t be too problematic. Writing memory safe code is also much easier in C++ than it is in C. Yeah, Rust is better, but it doesn’t seem to me like this is something that’s causing that many problems in KDE.
Well, it’s a big upgrade underneath. They’re moving from qt5 to qt6. Tons of fundamental wayland fixes with the new toolkit/framework. You might be right that it’s not that dazzling of a visual overhaul, but it’s a mature product. We need more polish than overhaul
The migration to Qt6 and the work being carried out on Wayland, which is all going into Plasma 6.0, is going to allow massive changes that will be introduced over the 6.x series. There are some pretty cool features in 6.0, but the bigger changes will come over the next few point versions.
It is unlikely you will see any of these updates in Plasma 6.0, as they are more proof of concepts than finished, tried and tested features. But you will see them introduced over the next versions in the 6-x series.
Are you a KDE user? I switched from Gnome 3 when Plasma 5 was new, the very moment it seemed close enough to finished to expect reasonable stability. It was a huge departure from KDE4, and after trying literally every other DE to find happiness away from Gnome (that's all I'm going to say about that) over the course of several years, it was such a welcome relief.
Plasma 5 was not only a life preserver for folks bailing from Gnome, it also showed they'd learned from their own mistakes with KDE4, which many users felt was just as much a trainwreck as Gnome 3.
There's a lot going on under the hood with the change to QT6 as noted, and that alone merits a version number change, IMO. I haven't tracked a whole lot of specific features, but I know there are a lot of wayland refinements and HDR support coming, and I'm doubtful that the many pointieststick blogposts have been doing nothing but writing about bugfixes and menu changes, even if I haven't read every single one of them.
The general default look and feel maybe isn't being radically changed, but this is Linux, and more importantly KDE; we're all about theming and customization anyway, right?
Most importantly they aren't throwing out the baby with the bathwater. They did it (intentionally or not) with 4, and then (in my perception) they were forced to do it with Plasma 5 because of KDE4.
After living through the transition from Gnome 2 to 3, and KDE 3.5 to 4, then feeling the relief when Plasma 5 just absolutely crushed it, I'm very happy to see them upgrading the undercarriage and making things generally better instead of building it all from the ground up again.
@be_excellent_to_each_other@leopold@Fizz I’m actually 100% happy with just bugfixes. KDE is my choice, but, I mean, its still a fairly buggy desktop. It’s great, all it needs is the masses of bugs fixed, anything that does that is good. That’s all it needs.
Yeah I understand it’s a lot under the hood, but people seem to anticipate it like it’s the best and most exciting thing since the second coming of sliced bread. I kinda don’t get it. But it’s good that it’s coming along. I probably won’t even notice a difference.
because those two things are pretty much what Plasma needs the most at this point. the two most common complaints about Plasma are that it’s buggy and that it’s ugly.
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