this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2024
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Out of curiosity, what do people here use the activities for? (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
submitted 4 months ago by abbiistabbii@lemmy.blahaj.zone to c/kde@lemmy.kde.social
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So Plasma has Activities, which is something I noticed a while back. I haven't really found any use for it other than maybe having a different desktop layout so I was wondering what everyone else used it for.

No shade to the people who added it, just curious.

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[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I have a bit of an unusual workflow, making use of 40+ workspaces, so I use Activities basically like meta-workspaces.

[–] abbiistabbii@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

You have my curiosity, I wanna know your workflow.

[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Right, so it all started when I tried bspwm a few years ago and noticed that it didn't have a feature to minimize/hide windows. So, I looked up what that was about and one of the devs said that you shouldn't minimize, just move the window to a different workspace.

And yeah, that broke my brain. Because it's also a tiling window manager and I was on a small laptop screen, so only 3 windows would fit on a workspace at most.

But after using it for a while, I noticed that:

  1. It reduces complexity. There's one fewer place where your window could be hiding.
  2. Combined with the tiling, it means that windows always have a place where they are. You scroll through your workspace list and it's going to be open/visible somewhere.
  3. This also means I can place windows next to each other when they're related. Or onto the same workspace, if I actively want to see both of them. And if two groups of windows/workspaces aren't really related, I can leave a workspace empty between them.
  4. This would work a lot better with a minimap to show where the windows are placed across workspaces.

And yeah, eventually I tried replicating this workflow in KDE, because it has the workspace pager for my minimap (I have my workspaces in a column, so they fit onto the panel).
And so I found a KWin script to do the tiling (currently using Polonium), and realized that Activities are really useful for splitting up completely unrelated windows, too.