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I think we need to simplify some of the new ways of working. You tube has a couple of videos of ideas for new desktop functionaliy (Gnome-3).

At the moment you can either treat Activities and Desktops as 2 separate things or you can link each Activity to a Virtual-desktop.

Linking the Activities to a Desktop makes it much less confusing (and should be the default option in my opinion) but limits the number of desktops to the number of Activities.

If you could have multiple sub-Activities, that is multiple virtual-Desktops linked to a particular Activity you could have more flexibility as well as still have the simplified linking of Activities to Desktops.

This would also work well with Changing Desktops on a per monitor basis (brainstorm.php?mode=idea&i=39358) to make the whole idea of Activities and multiple monitors seamless.

This would be extremely useful for multi-monitor setups. Activities on multiple monitors with different resolutions is currently horribly broken.

I agree that "activities"/"virtual desktop" needs to be fixed, and that the setting "1 activity per virtual desktop" should be default.
But I'm less sure about the core of your idea : I'm afraid that it would lead to too complex and confusing settings. The current situation is already too complex in my (humble) opinion:
- you can switch virtual desktop, that basically switch the X windows.
- you can switch activity, that switch the plasma desktop
...
It's okay for advanced user, but it is confusing for casual/new users. As I heard there is work to do better integration between kwin (virtual desktops) and plasma (activities), perhaps there could be a way to fusion the two concepts...

the confusion caused by having desktop and Activity separate is why activities and Virtual-Desktops should be tied together. My core idea of multiple Desktops per Activity, is not to separate them out again but to treat the Desktops as sub Activities.

So you might have a work activity and a personal activity and each would be tied to a virtual desktop (as is currently the case when you check the option to link activities to desktops).

But you might find that your work activity has too many windows open for 1 desktops so you want to have 2 desktops on the same "work" activity. The desktops are still linked to the activities and the activity still changes when you change desktop you just now cycle through the desktops as
Work-activity_Desktop#1
Work-activity_Desktop#2
Personal-activity_Desktop#1

TheBlackCat wrote:This would be extremely useful for multi-monitor setups. Activities on multiple monitors with different resolutions is currently horribly broken.

If the monitor is of different resolution the Activity/desktop should be scaled (3d desktop effect) so as to change the layout in an absolute minimal way.

I think to do this right the location of widgets on the desktop need to be stored as percentages of screen size rather than pixel sizes. (I don't know how this actually works so It might already be stored this way or might be good reason that it wont work)

Rms-Mit wrote:If the monitor is of different resolution the Activity/desktop should be scaled (3d desktop effect) so as to change the layout in an absolute minimal way.

I think to do this right the location of widgets on the desktop need to be stored as percentages of screen size rather than pixel sizes. (I don't know how this actually works so It might already be stored this way or might be good reason that it wont work)

This has been proposed numerous times but Aaron has rejected it, although I am not sure wh (no fault of his, I just haven't seen the explanation). It would also be possible to compare the previous resolution to the current resolution and scale the widgets appropriately. Or to tie individual activities to individual screen. I submitted a bug report about this early this year, but nothing has happened with it. https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=184162