I have a dream...

Make activities and virtual desktops work together perfectly by allowing each activity to have a different number of virtual desktops, each one with different wallpapers and widgets, even different taskbars/start menus if somebody actually wants this. So for example a user can have a "work" activity with 5 virtual desktops: one for libreoffice, one for folder view widget(s) for most often used document folders, one for email, one for banking (e.g. hibiscus) and one for a computer algebra system. Make each virtual desktop "save"-able into a single file, so the user can for instance save the email virtual desktop and reload it into a virtual desktop of the "internet" activity.

Then the user can also have a "gaming" activity with 3 virtual desktops, one for steam, one for locally installed games (a starter on the desktop for each one of them) and one for emulators with 3 folder viewers for let's say playstation 1, n64 and mame. And so on...

To reproduce your system on a new computer or on a laptop, also make each activity saveable into a single config file/archive containing all virtual desktops (with wallpapers, widgets and starters) included.

In my opinion this would make the ultimate desktop as it is fully customizable to the extreme and every user can create whatever they like. Just one screen like old windows machines or a highly complex system of activities and virtual desktops working together. Remember, it's a feature, you don't have to fully set it up or use it at all.

Please tell me what you think of this idea. If enough users like it, maybe it will become a reality. (KDE4 almost had it, but without different number of virtual desktops for each activity and no way to save/restore activities or desktops or move them around)

This seems not too far off of the overall goals for plasma.
There's also been some discussion recently in the VDG forum about this that would be well worth reviewing.

airdrik wrote:This seems not too far off of the overall goals for plasma.

Reading recent discussions I fear the developers want to go with monofunctional activities (single virtual desktop with same widgets, just more instances of it). That would be a huge step backwards from what made KDE4 so great. (On the other hand, when kde4 was released, I'd never had even dreamt of writing a line like that!)

kmcbenth wrote:Reading recent discussions I fear the developers want to go with monofunctional activities (single virtual desktop with same widgets, just more instances of it).

Where do you read this? Your idea is exactly what is being discussed. However, I believe that having a variable number of VD per activities is only a side note for the power of upcoming activities.

Heiko Tietze wrote:Where do you read this?

here: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=343246

Tagged "wontfix" and "resolved", as if just an activity could replace an activity with multiple (different) desktops

The technical "problem" (also regarding this bug) is that the feature of different wallpapers/plasmoids per VD was actually "faked" by mapping one VD to one activity.
This resulted in several glitches and "strange" things because some activities would be virtual desktops and some not etc. etc. - tl;dr: the approach turned out to be not a very smart idea

This is of course also a challenge to this proposal, because having different wallpapers etc. per virtual desktop requires one actual desktop window per virtual desktop (because of concurrent presence when invoking the cube/desktop grid etc.)

Afair the main request was oc. to have different wallpapers (as in pre-compositor times where the desktop could just believably paint another image when the VD changed) and the required complexity to keep the different desktop windows in sync otherwise (imo plasma applet config is a complete mess anyway) plus the inevitable resource usage overhead on 20 desktops (maybe even if you don't want them different at all) led to the decision to leave that strictly to activities, where every activity would clearly "just" have another independent dektop window.

This would be absolutely amazing if it also includes different themes for different activities. The most obvious addition with this feature would be the ability to be able to switch between a day-mode interface and a night-mode interface. If that happens, KDE would be almost completely perfect for me