Hi,

By now I am mostly using my laptop for work. For mobile work, writing and similar stuff I really like the small 12.1" size, but for other work I hook it up to external screens. Those screens are different at work, at home, when traveling or when giving a presentation. Unfortunately the KDE screen settings have not been reliable, e.g. monitors displayed only a part of the workspace, frozen sessions when switching back from one mode to another. Krandtray did often not show the options to activate the second screen. Using xrandr on the command line I could always work around this issues, but I came across another one, which this post is about, that is the managment of activities.

I currently have 10 activities, of which mostly 1-4 are running. Despite the rough edges I really like the approach of having a set of applications, widgets and content which fit your current activity. It feels like you can tailor your machine to the different purposes you work on, great stuff. However I got scared a bit using external screens. I did not yet understand how plasma assigns and/or creates activities to the secondary screen. Occasionally I have lost activities after switching back to single screen mode, which is frustrating, when you had it all neatly arranged.

Is there somewhere a guide how to deal with this or do I need to wade through the great unknown of plasma source code? In which mode (single and/or dual screen) is it save to create and switch between activities? Does one need to start from a clean configuration of plasma and/or kwin? How do virtual desktops fit into this?

Thanks in advance.

As far as I know you can't have per-screen activities. What happens when you connect an external screen is that Plasma creates an additional desktop ("containment") associated to that screen and that activities.

I've encountered your issue a couple time but I haven't been able to reproduce it reliably.

I know that part of the association is preserved, but I'm not sure how exactly. I use a dual screen setup but it's fixed hence different from one case.