How do you use them?

I used to daily drive KDE up until shortly after the 4 switch, when I moved to Mac. I've moved back to Linux starting in 2018 but went with i3. I installed KDE around Christmas to try it, and while I'm mostly impressed with the general polish (except that firefox doesn't react the same way as other windows to clicking on the frame), I have a hard time figuring out what activities are and how they're different from multiple workspaces.

Speaking of workspaces, is there no way to only have it show a small rectangle per space in the taskbar instead of a big wide one (I'm using multiple screens)? That's just a useless waste of space.

▲

zenoprax 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Activities function best as "context domains" (the classic split is "Personal" and "Work") while preserving your existing Workspaces.

I use workspaces to group apps/tasks/programs functionally (eg. "Active Projects", background stuff like music or a long running terminal task, no tiling).

Some things like Obsidian or Spotify are open on multiple Workspaces and multiple activities at the same time but only require a single instance.

▲

vladvasiliu 3 days ago | parent [-]

> Some things like Obsidian or Spotify are open on multiple Workspaces and multiple activities at the same time but only require a single instance.

Oh, you can do that? My first impression was that the activities were somehow completely separate, somewhat like profiles in firefox. Since I actually have stuff that isn't exactly context-related, specifically spotify, I thought it would be a pain to have to switch back and forth to interact with them.

	▲	zenoprax 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		> Speaking of workspaces, is there no way to only have it show a small rectangle per space in the taskbar instead of a big wide one (I'm using multiple screens)? That's just a useless waste of space. I missed this one. Yeah, I have the same problem and couldn't fix it but I use a tiling window manager so I didn't need that space for anything else. I've come to appreciate the overview actually and you can drag-and-drop windows between workspaces without having to jump around. I think the best way to describe Activities is that they filter "what" is available whereas Workspaces filter/select "where" it goes. Spotify automatically chooses my "Background Tasks" Workspace when it opens and it is available on all my Activities. My task manager always shows up in my main workspace but not in my "Gaming" activity. It's a really powerful feature once you understand how it works (eg. notifications from other activities can be muted; separate file and folder views; email accounts hidden in Thunderbird, etc.) Edit: You could probably get total isolation by using the other TTYs! A fully separate user and different desktop environment even. You just need to use Alt+F{1..9} to cycle between them. For a specialized workstation this could actually be a clean way to handle it.

▲

wolvoleo 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I have one for general stuff, one for when I'm working, mainly to minimise distractions, and one to do 3D work.

Each activity has 9 virtual desktops because that's what I use in the main profile.

And yeah Firefox is a bit different, however you can select an option to get the regular KDE menu bar back! I've done this.

And I configured my workspaces in a 3x3 grid, that way it doesn't take so much space (and also it's much easier to navigate them than 9 in a row!). This grid function is really one of the big things that annoys me in macOS (it used to have grids but they killed it when mission control came out), windows and Gnome. I need a grid, especially because I switch with hardware keys.