KDE Activities are AWESOME 😎.
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 27 ก.ค. 2024
- Today I talk about Activities and why I think they are one of, if not the, best feature that KDE has to offer.
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==== Time Stamps ====
0:00 Intro
0:48 Activities
1:20 First Look
1:28 What Are Activities?
1:59 Why is it good?
3:48 The Main Benefit
4:07 Creating an Activity
5:13 Switching Between Activities
5:30 Activities Settings
5:38 Activity-Specific Dock
6:43 Do Not Disturb per Activity
7:31 Conclusions
#kdeplasma #kde #thelinuxcast - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
This video was released early to my tier 2 and above patrons! patreon.com/thelinuxcast
Darn. I should start watching for that.
I agree! Activities were the reason why I switched to KDE Plasma.
To take the separation of stuff per activity one step further. I did not only give each one a distinct background, but I created folders inside /home for each activity and set the activities up to use that folder as it's 'location' . This gives you a separate desktop for each activity where you can place the relevant files. So have the applications and the material you are working on in the appropriate activity. In effect, this is like having different tables to work on for your different activities.
Setting different background image for each activity helps in differentiating activities and the favourite apps in launcher can also be customised by activity which is useful. Widgets can also be set for each activity differently.
So glad KDE doesn't hate you anymore. Thanks for the informative vid.
I have binge watched this channel. How on earth did I miss this one?
I use activities for tiling/floating so I have bismuth setup on one activity and disabled on the other. Best of both worlds.
That's a great idea
Just a suggestion: if you really think a feature belongs in kde, please make a bug report on their bug tracker. I couldn't find one so who knows, maybe it's a good idea that noone has thought about before.
Hey Linux Cast! I have been following your channel for sometime now and i noticed that you get better and better with your presentation! Everything is more fluent and smooth, really love to see you getting better at this! Glad that you review Linux topics.
This is a great breakdown of activities. You are right, KDE doesn't do a good job of advertising them, but based on what you shared I already have some ideas for how I would like to use activities.
Long time KDE user (at least used to be, daily is now Archcraft I bounce between Openbox and Wayfire - LOVE Wayfire), but never really understood what the difference between Activities and workspaces were, your explanation makes sense. Maybe I will flip over to my KDE partition and give that a whirl. Thanks for the video!
I'm been a KDE user for a couple decades, and I've been using Activities for so long that I completely forgot that KDE can also do virtual desktops, lol. My main work machine is a laptop docked with two external monitors, in the office. Occasionally I'll undock the laptop, and go work elsewhere, without my external monitors. What would be awesome would be if when I undock and end up with a single display, KDE automatically switches to have 3 virtual desktops, with the windows that were on my real external displays moved to the 2 extra virtual desktops. When I dock again, I'd like the windows on virtual desktops 2 and 3 to move to the external displays, and for kde to get rid of the extra virtual desktops. As I mentioned, I use Activities to separate different virtual environments (work, presenting, play, other), so the virtual desktops would really be only used as virtual versions of my external displays. As is today, when I undock the laptop, all the windows in the current activitity are moved to the laptop's internal display, which gets cluttered. Is this possible today?
I came back to this video to refresh my knowledge about Activities. As i switched back to KDE for now. And the moment I switched, off course Qtile got its first update in 1 year! I found this video again by searching the web, it was the first search result. 🙂
Wow! I didn't even knew activities existed and I've been using KDE for well over 2 years now. Thanks for this info even though this video is 9 months old!
I didn't use activities when I was in KDE but I probably would now. I've created pseudo activities in my Qtile setup. I designate WS 1 -3 (3 monitors) for personal and 4 - 6 for work stuff, then created a key binding to switch between each set of three all at once. I can still swap other workspaces (groups in Qtile) in and and out of those but using the binding will also reset it completely. works great so if I were to end up back on Plasma I would almost certainly use Activities.
Dude thanks for showing me this. This definitely will help me during work.
I love your content, thanks for everything Matt
+1 for do not disturb activity-wide!
The solution that @TheLinuxCast is asking for (to enable a Do Not Disturb mode when switching to a Work Activity).
If that is not available from KDE itself, then I would assign the key binding to a script that does both of these things consecutively.
Thanks for the video! I stumbled upon the activities by accident after I installed EndeavourOS with KDE on my private laptop. I use workspaces a lot and tend to use only a few different programs, e.g. I use neovim for all coding and text editing. So currently I don't think I need further separation than what workspaces allow for. But in case I get too much interference these activities may come in handy. KDE Plasma is really nice and polished, I did not use the more heavyweight desktops before, but I really like this one. I only needed to stop animations on changing desktops, that was a bit nausea inducing. Luckily, the settings UIs are really good on KDE and I immediately found how to do this.
I set Meta+Tab to switch between activities. Got 1 activity for main usage, and the other activity has chat and other apps I keep continually running in tile mode. This allows switching between background apps and active apps very easily!
This is very cool. Thanks Matt. I use KDE on Nix but still usually log into a wm.
I am now on Kubuntu since 2013. I never had serious issues although Plasma 4 could be bumpy. But Plasma 5 evolved into a fantastic piece of software. And I am always pushing the system to its limits. And yes, Plasma still requires a lot of diligence to configure it properly. But beside that KDE Plasma is the by far best OS I have worked with (professionally) during the last 45 years. The only system where I had a comparable level of user satisfaction has been OS/2.
Personally, I’ve played around with Activities, but found it to be largely redundant. If I want to organize my activities to that degree I simply open up additional virtual desktops. Work on desktop 1, play on desktop 2 - and that’s generally all I need.
And since I run dual monitors, its essentially as if each virtual desktop is doubled already. Anything more is just over kill.
When I was using KDE I knew about Activities too. Almost no one talks about it. But in my experience, they are not too much different from Workspaces/Groups to me. At least the way I utilized them. However when I watch your video then I can see how cool and useful they can be. Nowadays I am on Qtile only, so there is no way for me to try it out again.
Doesn't Gnome have Activities too?
Tbh as a newbie I don't understand the difference between activities and workspaces
@@agamersdiary1622 Workspaces is often the term used to describe Virtual Desktops, where each window can appear on different desktops you can switch to. Some window managers call it "groups" in example.
However from what I understand the Activities in KDE go a step further. Each Activity include its own set of Virtual Desktops, and add more settings like background image, shortcuts to apps and different set of widgets.
I am also a newbie to this and that is my current understanding so far.
I’m on the 6 month challenge. I’m new to linux and I’ve decided to use mint. So far so good and I’m enjoying it. I no longer have any machines running windows etc. I’m all in on linux. I’ve tried parrot,kali(thought I wanted to be a hacker) and endeavor os. I liked endeavor but I’m very happy with mint. No hopping for me for the next 6 months. Love your channel great job 🤘
Thanks! Good luck on the challenge!
I've actually never used this feature before despite using KDE for the past 20 years. It sounds like nested virtual desktops, which would be great for organizing your work activities. Maybe I'll give it a try next week and see how it fares because I do get a bit disorganized when separating the various programs I use by just desktops. Although I prefer using vim the way I have been for the past few months whereby I'll have a terminal take up half of the screen vertically and just use tabs for each file, *.h on one side, *.c on the other.
Never used that feature before because I didn't knew what it was until now. I'm going to use the shit out of this for now on
This is a nice feature for people that have really dynamic worflows , for example i have used workspaces for the best part of 25 years but that's cause i've always used the same tools 1.tmux 2.emacs 3.slack 4.browser , for the work i i do (dev) , it seems like the number of apps get's reduced a lot since the browser can do everything these days . But really good video and i guess activities are for people that use a lot of varying apps?
can I have a set of applications that open automatically for each activity? for exaple a activity open a notetaking and okular.
Personally, I think Kubuntu does KDE+Plasma just a little better than KDE themselves. KDE should stick to Plasma and Apps(minus the kStupid kNames)
How many times can you say activity in one video?
What??? Your using the "ALT" key! You must be back sliding... Lol
Weirdo! (said with love) 😄
That is a neat and some cool feature. Too bad other desktops don't offer it... 😥
Thanks Matt...
LLAP 🖖
Alt is useful. Just not as the super key
@@TheLinuxCast 😄
I gave activities a go to separate work and home... not it's not really up to the job. Yes I can have a different background and icons in the launcher, but I can't set Chrome as the default browser for work and Firefox for home. I ended up just setting up two accounts and flipping between them
I would like option to bind activity to screen... Maybe thats is option?
sooo... what are "activities"? Pin different icons to the menu bar?
Believe me, Matt, you're not the only one its hated. I have multi-monitors.
Apparently 5.27 fixes many multi-monitor issues. Also fractional scaling.
What if you just created another user called "work" and just login whenever you want to work, then logout when the work's done
Not nearly as efficient as a single keybinding.
did you stop using sleek, matt?
GVM.
You Hoppers 🧔♀️
Have you talked about KDE Bismuth yet? It's a great way to make KDE more of a tiling window manager.
Yup made a video on it ages ago
@@TheLinuxCast Oh ok. I must have mised it or forgotten about it. I'll look it up when I get a moment.
5.27.x will have native implementation. Will see how it works.
KDE 👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍
Isn't that also in gnome?
Yep... More efficient in my opinion
@@neotwenty-nineBzH can I keep activities in gnome after reboot?
@@agamersdiary1622 you mean?
@Neo Twenty-Nine I mean I chose that Firefox is in activity 1 and texteditor is in activity 2. Then I reboot my system and want that those applications still belong to the same activity
@@agamersdiary1622 not such things on gnome. It's not kde.
Activities work differently
I like KDE, but I switched to Gnome again. KDE is very powerful but sometimes it just too much. Activities is nice but it felt like one of those thing you have to train yourself to remember to use.
plasma is really good at the moment, tried it today after 2 years or so. last time i used it, every new update there was a major bug. but now it seems fine
As much as I wish KDE all the success, it's too messy for me. Who would have thought actually. GNOME is at the moment my only valid choice for a full fledged system 🙏