Coming of Age: Desktop Organization with Plasma Activities


If you haven't looked at Plasma Activities in awhile, you should take a second look. Recent updates make the tool the ultimate for organizing your desktop.
KDE Plasma identifies multiple desktops as Activities. Plasma Activities are one of the most versatile features on the Linux desktop -- and also among the least known or used. Over a decade after they were first introduced, Plasma Activities are finally coming into their own. Today, they can provide some of the ultimate in desktop customization with almost no effort.
Activities have been overlooked for several reasons. To start with, they were part of the botched and premature release of KDE 4.0, which for months had users in open revolt. What was supposed to be a bold innovation, a sign that the Linux desktop was no longer trying to catch up to proprietary ones, became a symbol of developers ignoring the needs of users. Neither does it help that Gnome uses the term “Activities” for its overview rather than a name for multiple desktops. Just as importantly, from the beginning, Activities have been under-documented, leaving users to puzzle out how to implement them. In particular, until recently, the difference between Activities and virtual workspaces was poorly defined and settled only when each Activity was given its own workspaces, making clear that workspaces are subordinate to Activities. However, probably the major cause of neglect is that the details of Activities have changed constantly, often becoming needlessly complex. For instance, in early releases, only one Desktop file was available, meaning that all resources for all Activities had to be placed in one file, and the resources not meant for a given Activity laboriously filtered out. Similarly, early on there were several types of Activities, many whose purpose was obscure. Only in recent releases have Activities become simple enough that they could be efficiently customized.
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