Out of curiosity, what do people here use the activities for?
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.
Mostly just change desktop wallpaper, have different pinned apps, and have some apps forced to start on specific activity using kwin rules.
And I sometimes also on top of that use workspaces, for additional split if different set of work/personal activities like switching between projects or leaving chat on one and IDE on another.
So it's almost like a simple 2x2 workspace grid but with additional window/taskbar rules.
I use them instead of virtual desktops - each with a specific hotkey, and some with customized pinned apps.
I have ...
General: Email, shopping, etc.
Gaming
Media
Two Work activities - a primary, and a secondary for when I need to compartmentalize different ongoing tasks
Other - for anything transitory that doesn't fit in the others.
I realize this could largely be done with virtual desktops, though I don't think you can have a different pinned app loadout for each?
The downside to setting things up this way is when I restart my computer, it seems to randomly decide which browser windows go in each activity. Also, with apps that I use across them (like Notion), I have to go hunting for which activity it opened in. To get around the issue of splitting Firefox across different profiles, I just use two browsers. Firefox for work, and Firedragon for personal stuff. They share the same external password manager, so it's pretty seamless.
An easy one is "Personal" and "Work." I havent figured out how to combine it with Firefox profiles yet, but basically: instead of having to have two entirely separate user accounts, you can have Activities instead, and can hot-toggle between them.
I would want personal and work separated as users, though. Work requires proprietary tools I don't want to give read access to my personal files. And not being able to hot-toggle between them is a feature.
I mentioned this in my own top-level comment, but I just use different browsers for work and personal. Firefox for work, and my distro's fork for personal. That keeps those nicely separate.
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:
It reduces complexity. There's one fewer place where your window could be hiding.
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.
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.
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.