David C. Rankin wrote:
On Sunday 23 August 2009 11:28:09 pm Patrick Shanahan wrote:
* John Andersen
[08-24-09 00:24]: Any way to just get rid of this concept of Activities all together? It was un-needed, a duplication of what already existed and totally confusing. so was removing rotary dial telephones and replacing them with push button dialers. What a waste of resources! And all these mobile phones when we already had wired ones. The next thing they will be making Dick Tracy's wrist radios for communication. Sheesh....
Patrick,
OK, I get what an "activity" is now. I guess it is something you need if you have a boss looking over you shoulder and need to "manage" your desktop on the fly;-) For those still scratching your heads like I have been about what an activity is or how to use it. Here are a few overviews I found at kde.org
http://userbase.kde.org/Glossary>Activities Activities are sets of Plasma widgets that have their own wallpaper. A bit like Virtual Desktops, but not quite.
For example you have a "work activity" with commit rss feeds, a note with your TODO, a Folder View with your work related files, and a subtle wallpaper.
Next to it, you have your freetime activity, with previews of family photos and dogs, rss feeds from your favourite blogs, a Folder View showing your movie collection, a twitter applet and of course that Iron Maiden wallpaper you have been loving since the early 80s.
At 1700 hours sharp you switch from the work activity to your freetime activity.
</quote>
And now a bit more on how to use them:
http://userbase.kde.org/Plasma#Activities_and_the_Zooming_User_Interface_.28ZUI.29>Activities and the Zooming User Interface (ZUI)
KDE 4 has brought a lot of new features to the modern linux desktop, however many people are only using a fraction of the desktop's full potential. One of the most useful and underused features is the plasma activities.
<much cut-and-pastage snipped> All that is the plan of course, but it is SUCH a long way around to achieve what was already there in simple Desktops. Add to that the fact that we work with applications, not widgets. There are very few useful widgets. There are no useful widgets which do not have an application equivalent (you know, the things the widget code was stolen from in the first place). Furthermore, by trying to add Activities to the concept of multiple desktops they have broken both. There should be a radio-button choice that says "I want to use traditional Desktops to run multiple applications on different work spaces" or "I have nothing to do, but bore easily and I want activities to swap in and out all day long". Well, ok, minus the snark, these things still don't mix well and there should be a way to use one or the other. Even when using a different activity for each desktop, they don't stay married to the desktop you set them up on. You zoom out, zoom back in again, and you may well have your work tools on your gaming desktop depending on which zoom tool you clicked. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org