Title asks it all I guess. I am resurrecting an older computer for my toddler-daughter to play with; actually its been real rewarding for me to do so in many ways. Anyways I began with a standard crunchbang-openbox setup and config'd from there. But I have hit a wall. I need independent desktops, each with their own desktop icons (crucial) as well as different wallpaper and even mouse icon themese (superfluous but desirable to keep the toddler's curiosity level max'd). It looks like kde activities will do exactly what I need, and only kde activities.

Now I am wondering, and I have a hunch already that I know the answer, but I am not completely sure. Can I run a kde4 environment with an openbox wm and retain use of kde4's activities features? Maybe kde-minimal + openbox = kde activities?

I am thinking no, since openbox's minimalist approach avoids desktop icons. I have played iDesk but alas I cannot see that it supports such a feature as different desktop icons for different desktops.

OP of:

http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic.php?id=26612

looks to have exhasuted the possibilities of implementing pcmanfm as desktop manager to do what is req'd, concluding that it is not possible. Close but no cigar. So now I am faced with putting kde4 on an older pc and the poential performance issues worry me, especially the intel onboard video that looks like it suffers running kde. Plus I do like the ease of configurability (non-gui) that openbox offers, so that would definitely be my preference if it would work.

Contructive replies and alternate suggestions are appreciated reading.

well I took the plunge and installed kde-full.

I can now confirm that it seems as though activities are still availabe when I login using openbox as the WM. I guess the activities app is yoked to the desktop env and not the WM like I thought. That's the good news.

The bad news, however, is that my concerns about the additional performance hit rang true. It takes the PC about an additional 60-120 secs. to render a desktop than when I login to my #!-openbox config, and even when the desktop finally presents itself there is an additional delay to open anything such as the Desktop tab. Even shutting down seems to take an extraordinary amount of time, I am unsure how long exactly b/c after about 30+ seconds of nothing seeming to happen after choosing reboot I simply logged into another shell and sudo shutdown instead. Sheesh, that is slow! Too slow for my taste.

Too bad really since I thought if I could run kde with openbox as WM things would run alrght even if (just) a little slower.

What are the specifications of this older system? It sounds like you might need to tweak various parts of the system to minimize resource consumption (disabling Nepomuk and it's associated indexing for instance).