From kde-panel-devel Fri Jul 13 14:33:00 2018 From: Roman Gilg Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2018 14:33:00 +0000 To: kde-panel-devel Subject: Re: Discussion for Virtual Desktops and Activities future Message-Id: X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=kde-panel-devel&m=153149245802627 On Fri, Jul 13, 2018 at 1:54 PM David Edmundson wrote: > > Whilst personally I am in favour of just completely unifying, I think the= re's an option that might be a happy medium. > > --- > > If we were to unify, we would do the following: So the following is not the "happy medium", but what you would be in favor of? But it looks not like complete unifying. > * Windows are not directly associated with activities > > * Windows are on N virtual desktops > > * Kwin and plasmashell taskamanager/pagers only speak virtual desktops. R= eferences to both VDs and activities in the UI are reduced to 1 list. That makes sense. I would argue there still should be a property on VDs to inform KWin, if they are not part of the current activity and therefore should not be switched to when switching through VDs. Also the pager must know which VDs not to display in the current activity. But as said this can be a porperty on the VDs and not on the Activity. > > * The provider of the list of virtual desktops is ultimately kactivityman= agerd Why is KAMD the provider? I think KWin should be the provider of all VDs and KAMD then tells KWin which subset of VDs should be currently switchable (using the property above) depending on the activity KAMD has set. > ---- > > There's nothing there that forces 1 activity =3D=3D 1 desktop. > Instead we can associate desktops with activities. > > i.e Kactivitymanagerd with 2 activities, that wanted 2 desktops on each a= ctivity it could choose to create 4 desktops named: > > work - 1 > work - 2 > browsing - 1 > browsing - 2 > > With KAMD only switching the DBus currentActivity when switching between = the first two desktops to the last two. > > We remove all the overlap in the UI. Plasma+KWin code still get /massivel= y/ simplified. A user can still have multiple desktops associated with the = same activity for correct stats/tagging. Shortcuts to change activity will = go to KAMD instead of kwin, which can then tell kwin to go to an explicit d= esktop. > > There will be some behavioural changes to the current state, but I don't = think there would be any actual regressions. > > David Sounds like a fine plan on the backend side. VDs and Activites would then still be available and could be combined arbitrarily. If we go with that then another topic we should discuss in the future is how to make the Activity Ui more intuitive to use.