Peter Van Lone wrote:
So -- in the case of your desired feature (diff wallpaper on each desktop) there is no real advantage to activities -- you can get what you want, but perhaps it takes a couple more steps. But activities ALSO do other things (were designed to do so) and the wallpaper thing was a secondary feature. Perhaps backsliding a bit, from the perspective of wallpaper/virtual desktops (in that it is marginally more clumsy to setup) but ... also a very different feature set than what KDE 3.5 virtual desktops had.
You've totally missed the point of this whole discussion Peter. Nobody is complaining about how many clicks it takes to set up different wall paper, or different widgets on the desktop. People are complaining because it doesn't work. It is totally unreliable, it will corrupt itself for no obvious reason, and even running with everything "locked" you will find your desktop setup corrupted for no obvious reason. Activities breed like rabbits at times you least expect. Zooming out can reveal 5 desktops today, and 8 tomorrow when you can't remember doing anything at all that should cause this. Further you can't delete them because the Red X has vanished. Zoom out from your Programming desktop, with all your programming widgets, and zoom in to your Gaming Activity and now your IDE, Konsole shells, and programming applications, are surrounded by your gaming toys and wallpaper. Where your programming widgets and wallpaper went is anyone's guess. Once corrupted, all work comes to a halt, the task at hand is forgotten, and you have a 15 minute hunt trying to get things back, with at least two new activities generated along the way. Developers view any mention of this as a personal attack and a "barrage of criticism". Users see it as platform instability, unreliability and something they have no hope of explaining to their mother who found no such problems with gnome or windows. Its as much work helping mom recover her desktop as it was fighting viruses on windows for her. Add to this is the big disconnect that people work with applications, not widgets upon activities. There are very few useful widgets and the ones that exist are unlikely to become mainstream. Therefore until or unless you can wrap an application in a widget and nail it to an activity which in turn can be absolutely nailed down to the top left Desktop of the pager, widgets have little value in the real world. The basic problem (the 700 pound gorilla in the room) that developers seem to have forgotten, is that Applications run on Desktops, where as widgets run on activities. Mixing the two concepts is currently a mess. If Activities could easily contain mainstream applications we could dispense with the Pager and multiple desktops and substitute the activity pager. Activities, at present, is a concept that was implemented before it was thought thru, and programmed before it was designed, and imposed before it was working. Nobody is concerned about how many clicks it takes as long is once set up it remains stable. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org