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.
How is Wayland “ready” when critical things like idk, non QT apps quiting when the compositor crashes (and thus losing progress!) are called a “non showstopper”
@klangcola I'm not commenting on whether ot should be a show stopper or not. Just that it will eventually come also for non-Qt apps with MRs from KDE contributors to other projects.
its not listed as one is the weird thing, because it totally should be
imagine drawing and suddenly your compositor crashes leading to your program to crash and you to lose hours of progress, but other QT programs are fine
should’ve used krita because that’s QT except you cant replicate your workflow in that program because it misses features (and also you dont like it)
This is a real scenario I would have to worry about. That’s a showstopper for me
@Zamundaaa@mnglw xorg Apps don't crash when the compositor crashes, you can just switch out compositors/window managers. But xorg Apps crash when the xserver is crashing
A huge issue I see is that it feels like Dolphin has memory issues at the moment. I get permanent background crashes for no specific reason (already reported).
And rewriting apps in Rust is not existent for Qt, as it uses C++ a lot as far as I understood.
I dont like the design of GTK, even though its more modern in a way, but there are already lots of GTK apps in Rust.
Somehow I think KDE is a bit doomed here. Its Qt or a complete rewrite which will not happen.
Do you know more about this? A big part also is that I often hear young Devs dont learn C and C++ anymore, but maybe prefer Rust if any low level language.
I love KDEs features, and I am very excited for Plasma 6, which will hopefully be a lot more stable and cleaned up!
I’m all for some good old Rust evangelism, but I think it’s a bit of a stretch to claim that KDE is "doomed"in the absence of a migration path to Rust, and it’s not obvious to me that moving to Rust is somehow a necessity for the long-term viability of a project.
To your point about young devs and C/C++, afaik C is still pretty standard curriculum for CS degrees at most colleges and universities. C++ maybe not so much, but I would argue that it actually has a shallower learning curve than Rust. IMO the STL is a lot easier to get a grasp on as a newer developer than Rust’s borrow checker or lifetime system.
IMO the STL is a lot easier to get a grasp on as a newer developer than Rust’s borrow checker or lifetime system.
I actually feel like Rust’s borrow checker is more difficult to learn for experienced devs. We’ve got a trainee in Rust and for her, it’s just a normal thing that variable slots hold ownership and can lend it and get it back. She does sometimes still struggle with when to clone and when to borrow, but she’s getting there.
As for the lifetime system, no one on our team really gets that one. 🙃
But (that’s because) you rarely need it.
I would agree with that decision - Dolphin handles tabs very well and if the need ever arises for something like split view, I just hit ctrl + T. Feels more natural to me.
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.
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