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List:       gentoo-user
Subject:    Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Relocating notification popup KDE-4.5
From:       Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon () gmail ! com>
Date:       2010-12-28 7:31:42
Message-ID: 201012280931.43217.alan.mckinnon () gmail ! com
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Apparently, though unproven, at 01:08 on Tuesday 28 December 2010, Alex 
Schuster did opine thusly:

> Alan McKinnon wrote:
> > Apparently, though unproven, at 18:35 on Tuesday 30 November 2010, Alex
> > 
> > Schuster did opine thusly:
> > > Alan McKinnon writes:
> > > > Activities. wtf are those?
> > > 
> > > I tink they are really cool, although I don't use them, and probably
> > > never will. But I'm not the average user. I have six virtual desktops
> > > (current screenshots are at
> > > http://www.wonkology.org/comp/desktop/2010-11-11/ ), each one has its
> > > purpose. For each window you can define the desktop it will run on.
> > > You change the desktop, and you get new windows displayed, while the
> > > plasmoids stay the same.
> > > 
> > > With activities it's the other way around. You switch the activity, and
> > > the windows stay the same, but you get different plasmoids.
> > 
> > That's a decent explanation, thanks a lot. I can see how some folks would
> > like that and why it's been coded.
> 
> In case you're still interested, this blog entry has some more information
> on activities:
> 
> http://chani.wordpress.com/2010/12/26/activity-oriented-vs-application-orie
> nted-workspaces/
> 
> It also covers differences in Gnome's and KDE's approach to this activity
> stuff.

Good find, it does answer some questions! (especially in the comments).

I tend to agree with the long post by user Fri13; to a casual observer my life 
and desktop looks nicely organized and everything one-to-one mapped to 
something else. In reality, it's just like everyone else - a mish-mash 
collection of stuffs that somehow makes sense in my head.

So I looked long and hard at this, and found that my desktop is *taskbar-
centric* - it's my primary way of organizing things. Apps are spread across 6 
virtual desktops in a very ad-hoc style - amarok is on desktop 6 (where it's 
out of the way), kontact on desktop 2 (where it can be full screen), konsole 
sticky on the right hand side of all desktops (where I can see it everywhere), 
and all browsers usually end up on desktop 1 with large numbers of tabs each. 
Note there's no common method to this madness :-)

Like most people, my work is never nicely categorized by Activity - it's too 
fluid and changeable and too subject to my mood and how I feel today. I also 
don't like abstracting away the specific app used for a function, I do care 
whether it's gwenview, okular or digiKam that's loaded an image. They are not 
mere apps, they are tools, and I'm always aware of what tool I'm using. 
There's a parallel in the real world - to cut a piece of steel in my workshop 
I can use any one of several tools and they are NOT interchangeable; to cut a 
2" square tube to length I *do* want the angle grinder and not the hacksaw, so 
I chose the tool myself and do not have it handed to me by some magic 
selector. Apps are similar, they have their strengths and weaknesses and I 
usually know which one I want.

So now I do understand Activities better. It can be a good idea and I'd like 
to see some usage experts survey it extensively to make it more obvious how it 
works. One function that comes to mind which I would use is to return the 
desktop to a prior state. I often work from home and then want my apps 
arranged the same way I have them at work.

But for now I think I'll just continue the way I always have with a good old 
Unix virtual desktop setup and KDE session manager.


-- 
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com

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