Marc Chamberlin said the following on 02/21/2010 07:22 PM:

[...]

With reference to that same "plasmoid" button, the Zoom Out is also daunting and I don't fully comprehend it yet. The documentation tells me that it shows me "Activities" Ok.. whatever but to me they look like miniature representations of my various desktops.

OK, stop there. An Activity is NOT a Desktop. I have one-and-only-one Activity with six desktops on it. I'm sure someone can explain why there is the capability for many Activities. To me they seem like a very high level separation of work. I separate work with desktops - mail, web, files, terminal - but perhaps the developers were doing things like A1: [ mail, web, files, terminal ] A2: [ editing, compiling testing of KDE games, one desktop for each of various tasks ] A3: [ editing, compiling testing of KDE editors ] But then again not. Why some of us can do this with just desktops and windows and they need Activities ... or perhaps the reasoning is quite different. But an Activity seems a collection of Desktops. They seemed to associate a background image with each Activity rather than with each desktop. One reason I speculated like the above. If anyone has a better explanation I'd love to hear it. I've found no reason for multiple activities when I can have multiple desktops. But that's me.

Sometimes, and again I do not understand the context of what drives this, a menu also pops up in this "zoom" display and it has an additional item that I had not previously discovered - "Add Activity"

Given that you have the capability for "Activities", zooming back to overview them and zooming in to one, makes sense. Being able to create more makes sense.

[...] In fooling around I decided to "Add Activity" and now I got a bunch of these "Activities"/"Desktops" and I cannot for the life of me figure out how to get rid of the ones I created! Only one of them (which I don't want to delete) has a big red X on its tab so I am stuck!

BTDT. Somehow found out how to delete it and never went there again :-)

When I zoom in on one of the "Activities"/"Desktops" i.e. return to my normal world, I now find that my whole world of desktops has changed!

Of course! Its actually a different Activity. Its a shame you can't name them and switch them as easily as Desktops.

Some of the new desktops are now available and some are apparently inaccessible. I have chosen to have just four desktops but I got no idea as to how to assign one of the "Activities"/"Desktops" to a particular desktop.

Nonononon! It doesn't work like that. I'm sure it _could_, but its not programmed that way. You're thinking of Activities as being like Desktops. where you can drag or move a windows between desktops. They're not. They are containers for desktops. But you can't move desktops between them. They are deep silos with a set of desktops in them. Its like a whole new ... well not virtual machine, not virtual login, but sort of. Sort of. Personally I have no use Activities. You find them confusing; I find them irrelevant. If they went away neither of us would miss them. Perhaps they should be relegated to a dynamically loadable module of some kind, like all that stuff in Compiz. If you don't want it you don't enable it. -- Ideology, politics and journalism, which luxuriate in failure, are impotent in the face of hope and joy. -- P. J. O'Rourke -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

Oh boy! am I lost! I guess I have to be added to the class of users who have failed to grok the new KDE4 user interface.. Sigh.. Just installed SuSE11.2 with Version 4.3.1 (KDE 4.3.1) "release 6" (well Hump! just discovered yet another non obvious feature - to copy/paste that from the About KDE dialog I had to go into the Klipper and "Enable Clipboard Actions". Sigh, but that is not what I am writing about...) Copy/paste should work regardless of whether clipboard actions is enabled, but anyway. Different topic. I advise upgrading to KDE4.4.0 as well, the procedure for doing so is detailed in http://en.opensuse.org/KDE But on to the details

Ok plasma, desktop, panels, activity, dashboard.... my head hurts... Can some kind guru explain to me, in simple terms, what exactly each of these are, and the overall model of how all these play together? (Yeah I have TRIED to RTFMs and no they did not help, I am still lost.. And yes I have been fooling around for hours trying to get a feel for how these things are controlled, again no grok...) Let's start with a "widget" - or "plasmoid" or "plasma applet" when specific to KDE - is any small object on the desktop interface that shows information or does something, like the weather forecast viewer,

On 22/02/10 00:22, Marc Chamberlin wrote: the media player control, etc. All modern OS's are incorporating these, from Window's Sidebar to Mac OS X's dashboard to Google Gadgets. Whether we like it or not widgets are a key part of the next generation of software so might as well get used to 'em. A Panel is the plasma name for the bar type of thing at the bottom of your screen with the taskbar and system tray and clock on it. In KDE3 it would have been kicker. The word "desktop" is somewhat ambiguous - do you mean "desktop interface" as in everything you see on the screen, including the background and the panel, or do you mean "virtual desktop" - which is a feature that allows application windows to be grouped and hidden together. Virtual deskops actually have nothing to do with the desktop interface - virtual desktops are actually controlled entirely by the window manager, e.g. kwin. I will try to be unambiguous for the rest of the explanation, but remember the distinction. When I say desktop interface I mean the entire interface, when I say virtual desktop I mean the feature of kwin where you assign windows to only show when you have selected their virtual desktop. Now the all-important buzzword plasma - all it really is, is the name of the program/libraries used to draw the desktop interface in KDE 4. The panel, the desktop background image, the widgets (again, called "plasmoids" or "plasma applets" in KDE), are all plasma's responsibility. Where other OS's just added widgets on top of their normal interface, Plasma in KDE4 took the widget idea to its logical conclusion and made everything on the desktop interface a plasma applet. So the system tray, the clock, the taskbar, the desktop pager, everything is a plasma applet. The advantage of this is that each widget is independent of the others so it is truly possible to configure your desktop interface to work exactly the way you want it. It is possible to add as many panels whereever you want them and mix and match the components that go on them. So for example you could have the system tray on a panel on the top of the screen and the taskbar on a different panel on the bottom, or you could have no taskbar and go for a Mac OS -style dock, or whatever you can imagine. Plasma has introduced an incredible flexibility on what information is available to you from your desktop interface, and there are literally hundreds of useful applets available both builtin and from others on the internet. Moving on, an Activity is a group of plasma applets, just as a virtual desktop is a group of application windows. So just as you would assign a window to desktop 1 and then it would only be visible when you had desktop 1 selected, you can do the same with groups of plasma applets. So you can create an activity and add a weather forecasting applet to it, and it will only be visible when you are in that activity. This is very useful for the same reasons that virtual desktops are useful, as when you have lots of plasma applets on the desktop interface it becomes useful to only view a few of them at a time. I hope that that makes the reason that activities are different from virtual desktops obvious too - I know a lot of people have trouble with this one. Virtual desktops are for grouping application windows, activities are for grouping plasma widgets. It is perfectly reasonable to want to mix and match the two types since they do not overlap. This, contrary to rumours, will stay the same in KDE4.5. (See [1]). Note that plasma applets on panels are independent of activities (they stay visible in all activities), only plasma applets on the desktop are involved. The dashboard is a special mode of the desktop interface where all your application windows (and panels) are hidden and only your plasma applets are displayed. Its useful when you need to have a quick look at information from an applet. The default shortcut for the dashboard is Ctrl-F12. It's a bit like the Show Desktop feature except that instead of seeing just a blank desktop, you see your plasma applets. Just to give you even more choice, it is possible to assign plasma applets to display only on the dashboard (so not in the normal desktop interface). This means that, effectively, the dashboard can be a separate activity. This is similar to Mac OS X behaviour. This setting is available under System Settings -> Desktop -> Workspace in KDE4.4. Unfortunately the UI of switching between activities is ... terrible. It is called the Zooming User Interface and is the use of the "Zoom Out/In" buttons. The idea was that you would zoom out of your desktop, see your different activities organized next to each other in a grid, and then zoom back in to the one you want. It didn't turn out to work so well and is the main reason there is so much confusion about activities - the ZUI is buggy and most users simply haven't figured out how to get to them. Thankfully the ZUI is most likely being abandoned for KDE4.5. Instead, I recommend you use the "Activity Tabbar" applet to switch between activities. It is far more intuitive and behaves much more like the desktop pager for virtual desktops. In my configuration, I have 4 virtual desktops and 3 activities. I have a standard panel with menu, taskbar, system tray at the bottom of the screen and another panel with the activity tabbar at the top of my screen. This allows me to switch between the three activities, where I have an empty activity for when I don't want to be distracted, an activity full of system monitor applets to keep an eye on the system, and an activity with interesting applets like the twitter client and the weather forecast. And of course I have the four virtual desktops to group my application windows just as in KDE3.

I have managed to accomplish a few goals, the toughest being setting up a different background image for each, uh I guess they are still called desktops... Here comes the result of the ambiguity in the meaning of the word desktop. Remember what I said earlier about virtual desktops being under control of the window manager, kwin, whereas plasma is the one responsible for drawing the desktop interface, including the background image. So technically there is no relationship. Different backgrounds images are only possible on different Activities, because Activities is all that plasma knows/cares about. It has no idea about virtual desktops. However because the KDE devs knew that a lot of people wanted this feature anyway from KDE3 (even though it is slightly illogical), they have implemented a way to support it, which you seem to have half-discovered. What they have allowed is a way to force a link between each activity and virtual desktop. So that when you switch virtual desktops, you also switch activities, and therefore have the net effect of changing background image - but other plasma applets will change too.

Also found and turned on a few of the neat dazzling effects but not entirely sure what the difference is between some of them.. (for example Desktop Cube v.s. Desktop Cube Animation, Explosion v.s. Fall Apart... I don't see any difference in these..) Yes, unfortunately the desktop effect names are not terribly descriptive. I can't really help except say just try a bit of experimentation, it is possible to enable/disable the effects on the fly so it shouldn't hurt. I cannot understand how one controls the display of icons that one wants available on a "desktop". From /home/user/Desktop. Right now, on two desktops these are displayed the same as they were under KDE3.5. On another these are displayed in a semi-transparent "folder" window and on the fourth "desktop" there is nothing displayed at all. Going back to what I said earlier about plasma. One of the key points was that everything was made into an applet - including the display of desktop icons. This means that you are no longer tied to viewing just

In my various attempts to normalize and understand how these are configured, I have managed to change them but have no understanding of how I manage to change the configuration or why. Repeating my moves fails to reveal just what was done to make a change. Lets see, things I have tried - various combinations of the Plasma Settings - "Different Activities for each desktop" and "Use a Separate Dashboard" (which I have no idea what that means..) Or Adding the Widget for "Show Desktop" which I can't figure out what it does, just puts up a blue box icon. Can't find anything under the "Configure Desktop" app and right clicking on the "desktop" background and selecting "Desktop Settings" only gives me a dialog box for setting the background image. Yup, these are the settings I've been talking about. Hopefully it makes a bit of sense now. The, I guess it is called a plasmoid, or in other words the half circle button in the upper right corner of my screen seems to be context sensitive somehow and will bring up a different menu based on something unknowable at least to me. Sometimes it will, for example, include the menu item that will allow me to "Configure Plasma" and sometimes not. I got no idea why it decides what set of items to display, are or are not appropriate, but it seems to be related to the particular "desktop" that I am on. Flipping through the desktops seems to get me to one eventually that will give me the menu items that I am looking for. The half-circle button you describe is technically called the plasma toolbox. It is basically plasma's configuration button. The reason it changes state is that the desktop can be either "locked" or "unlocked". Note this has nothing to do with screensaver/password locking. This is applet locking/unlocking. When the desktop interface is locked, plasma applets are locked in

In KDE4.3 this setting, "Associate Activities per Virtual Desktop" or something similar, was found in the "Configure Plasma" dialog of the plasma toolbox (the half-circle in the top right of the screen, also known as the "cashew"). In KDE4.4 this setting has moved inside System Settings -> Desktop -> Virtual Desktops. A warning though, if you have a complex plasma setup and then try and enable it things get very confused. It's best to enable this on the first load of a fresh, empty plasma configuration. However before you enable this feature, figure out if you would actually be better off with separate activities and virtual desktops, I know I certainly am. Switching activities still allows you to have multiple background images, its just that you have to use the activity tabbar to swap between them and not the virtual desktop pager. the contents of ~/Desktop - you can view as many folders as you want and configure them individually. To do this just add the folder view applet to your current activity. However, the KDE devs knew that people would want the option for plasma to behave exactly as its predecessors did by displaying only one folder's worth of icons across the whole screen. So there is a way to make it behave like that. If you right click on the desktop interface background image and select "Activity Settings" (KDE4.4) it is possible to change the activity type to "Folder View". This effectively means the entire desktop interface is one big folder view applet, so it behaves exactly as KDE3 and other OSs. In the end, its your choice whether to use an entire folder view activity, many folder view applets, or do like I have done and dispense with desktop icons altogether. Who needs desktop icons when I have quick launch buttons on my panel and super-fast file search and application launching from krunner? What you are seeing in your specific configuration is the result of enabling the previous feature I talked about, linking activities to virtual desktops. You now have 4 virtual desktops and therefore 4 activities. Each has its own background image, but also its own set of plasma applets. Apparently you have one activity set to be a folder view activity, activities with a folder view applet on it, and one activity with nothing on it. It's up to you to configure it how you like. place. They cannot be added, moved, or removed. When the desktop interface is unlocked, plasma applets can be added using "Add Widgets" in the plasma toolbox, moved - either using the slide-out handle that appears when you mouse over an applet on the desktop interface, or on the panel by dragging and dropping with the panel toolbox open - and also removed. It is a good idea to keep your desktop interface locked normally so you don't accidentally mess up your careful arrangement of applets and panels. So obviously the Toolbox only offers Add Widget functionality when the desktop is unlocked. The toolbox was cleaned up a bit in KDE4.4, it'll probably make a bit more sense when you upgrade.

With reference to that same "plasmoid" button, the Zoom Out is also daunting and I don't fully comprehend it yet. The documentation tells me that it shows ... Dunno HOW I GOT That "feature" activated but now I feel like I am driving a car with a busted steering wheel! Please, please stay FAR FAR FAR away from the Zooming User Interface! It has bugs like the off-centre zooming you describe and is just too confusing anyway, it gives plasma activities a bad name. I sincerely hope it will be dropped for KDE4.5, and I have heard that this might happen. So hopefully soon you won't have to worry about this. But in the meantime as I said before use the "Activity Tabbar" applet to switch between activities instead, it works and is intuitive (it behaves just like the desktop pager) and never never click the "Zoom Out / Zoom In" buttons. One last thing, in KDE3.5 and before, one was able to only have icons in the kicker panel shown for the particular desktop one was working in. Now it seems that all icons for all desktops are shown regardless. That leads to a lot of clutter and confusion, IMHO, as I like to organize my tasks, so that related items are together on each desktop and I only want those icons shown for the desktop I am currently working in. Any way to get that ability back? It is still possible to only show tasks on the current virtual desktop in the task bar. Just right click on some empty space in the taskbar - click "Task Manager Settings" and choose the appropriate setting under Filters. I will stop here for this posting, I am having other issues with understanding KDE4 as well but they are different topics... If I can figure out what the difference between a dashboard and an activity I might be a happy camper for now... ;-) Hopefully not too long an explanation, if you've still got more questions fire away.

Regards, Tejas [1] http://chani.wordpress.com/2010/02/20/the-limits-of-virtual-desktops/ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org