Let me preface this post that I am definitely new to Activites. My coworker is sold on them, whereas I have always used Virtual Desktops. Perhaps the fact he has one huge monitor whereas I have one large monitor and four medium sized monitors is a contributor... but I digress!

As I have switched from 5 x virtual desktops to (5 x activities)*2 virtual desktops and have read up and explored settings and such... I have discovered that stopping an activity, or more precisely the very definition of the word "stopped" might be different in the context of activities.

Example 1:
1. Work => I open two Brave profiles related to work
2. Personal => I open one Brave profile related to work and start playing a YouTube video
3. I switch back to Work and stop Personal
4. Personal is stopped but the YouTube video continues playing, indicating that it's not really stopped or released from RAM

Example 2:
1. Work => I open two Brave profiles related to work
2. Personal => I open one Brave profile related to work and start playing a YouTube video
3. I right-click one of my Brave windows > hamburger menu > Exit
4. All Brave profiles across all activities exit

Example 3:
1. Work => I open two Brave profiles related to work
2. Personal => I open one Brave profile related to work and start playing a YouTube video
3. I stop Work
4. I log off my Plasma profile
5. I log back in
6. Work => I open one work Brave profile and see the browser crashed warning, indicating that my browser did not shutdown properly and asking if I want to reopen previous tabs (the same happens if I switch to Personal and open my personal Brave profile there)

So basically, after analyzing all these scenarios, I have to conclude that "stopped" is definitely not similar to pausing a virtual machine (where disk I/O and CPU cycles are no longer used but RAM is not released) or hibernating a computer (where the resources are actually persisted to disk, i.e. completely released, including power). Rather, it seems that "stopped" Activities are just... hidden from view?

I am sure there are other things happening when an Activity is "stopped" but I cannot imagine what those are. If anyone can enlighten me by pointing me to a resource or sharing what knowledge they have of the backend processes, I would appreciate it.

Unfortunately, I am really looking for a "stop" action that is more in the vain of the hibernation where whatever I have up under an activity is truly persisted to disk and removed from memory to the degree that even if I completely restarted my workstation, I could start the Activity back up and have everything resume where I had left off.

I think that this here is related to Chrome-like browsers not working with Activities, even with profiles. I don't have this sort of issue using Firefox with multiple profiles, but Chrome acts like you describe.


You can use a system monitor to see what is happening when you close and activity.

I think you are correct, but I'm not sure it's limited to just Chromium-based browsers. Case and point, I was working on an LibreOffice Writer doc this morning in a particular Activity. When I stopped the Activity, I filtered processes in htop and found them all still loaded into RAM. If the contents of the Activity were truly stopped, I should not see any of these processes. Now that said, I also had Dolphin open and I do NOT see any related processes. I verified this by opening Dolphin in my current Activity and see the processes show up. When I close Dolphin, all the processes disappear. When I reopen the stopped Activity, the Dolphin window I had open there appears and the htop view in my other Activity then shows all the processes. So I'm starting to think that 1st party apps are truly stopped when the Activity is stopped, but 3rd party apps are not necessarily handled in the same way. From a developer perspective, I can sympathize with this simply because knowing how to close and reopen (i.e. remember last state) of every 3rd party app out there would be a monumental task.

I tried this with two browsers.

Firefox: The video continued in the background and when I reopened the activity, it was already open.

Falkon: The video stopped and the browser visibly opened when I restarted the activity.

I have noticed in the past when Firefox updates and restarts, all the browsers in the closed activities open in the currently used ones. Like TitaniumCoder477 said, I think this is a KDE vs Non KDE apps difference.

TitaniumCoder477 wrote:I think you are correct, but I'm not sure it's limited to just Chromium-based browsers. Case and point, I was working on an LibreOffice Writer doc this morning in a particular Activity. When I stopped the Activity, I filtered processes in htop and found them all still loaded into RAM. If the contents of the Activity were truly stopped, I should not see any of these processes. Now that said, I also had Dolphin open and I do NOT see any related processes. I verified this by opening Dolphin in my current Activity and see the processes show up. When I close Dolphin, all the processes disappear. When I reopen the stopped Activity, the Dolphin window I had open there appears and the htop view in my other Activity then shows all the processes. So I'm starting to think that 1st party apps are truly stopped when the Activity is stopped, but 3rd party apps are not necessarily handled in the same way. From a developer perspective, I can sympathize with this simply because knowing how to close and reopen (i.e. remember last state) of every 3rd party app out there would be a monumental task.

I think it is more that closing an activity is not supposed to close the running programs and then reopen them, but save what you were doing. More like a suspend of sorts. At least that is the way I have been using them over the years.

I'd be annoyed if everything physically closed when I turned them off, but of course that is just my own preference.

I need to check if anything is running in closed activities after a reboot.


Admittedly, the system is far from perfect