From kde-panel-devel Fri Jul 13 15:22:31 2018 From: =?UTF-8?B?SXZhbiDEjHVracSH?= Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2018 15:22:31 +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=153149539403542 @David Regarding the backend (wherever the actual logic ends up in - kwin or kamd), your idea does sound nice. It would also provide the ability that some of the 'C' category users wanted - to have variable number of VDs per activity. But the problem is not primarily how to handle the 'unification' implementation-wise, but UI-wise. UI is what we primarily need to be concerned with. One potential UI approach that came to me, which might be able to cover all categories of users and which would fit David's proposal, is the following,: - Activities and VDs get mostly merged. The current activity switcher + VD animations end up there (with some improvements). - Window organization part of VDs gets changed into "window groups" or "window sets" where the windows can be grouped together. Switching the groups could use the same effect as minimize/restore, but with a group of windows. Or something along those lines. This would provide the more obvious distinction - "groups" are for window management and "activities" are about providing different workspaces. "groups" would be volatile in the sense that their number can vary a lot - quick creation, automatic destruction etc. (like activities in gnome shell) Now, this would require *a lot* of work, and while supporting all the use-cases for activities/VDs I know of, it would change workflows of many users. OTOH, these components would need significant **coordinated** changes: - Task manager - Pager - Activity-related applets - KWin - KWin rules (we still need to be able that certain applications need to be always in same 'group') - Plasma And I'm not sure we could have a slow roll-out of the features across several releases. This would need to be done all at once. Cheers, Ivan