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The problem
I prefer activities over virtual desktops, but I don't use them currently because I can't switch between them using "Desktop Wall" or "Desktop Cube" effects as i can do with virtual desktops.
I have read that activities and virtual desktops can't be merged together mainly because of technical difficulties (check out http://chani.wordpress.com/2010/02/20/t ... -desktops/ for more info on the subject). Furthermore, it seems like many people don't like the idea of merging those two things because they use both separately, virtual desktops for organizing stuff spatially and activities to organize stuff contextually

The solution
My proposed solution is to enable new keyboard shortcuts on the "Desktop Cube" and "Desktop Wall" effects to switch activities. They would make these effects behave this way:

• Desktop Cube: Using the new keyboard shortcut to switch activities would make the "Activity cube" appear on screen, having the "Desktop Grid" view of each activity mapped on each side of the cube. When selecting a side on the cube (an activity), it would zoom to that desktop grid view and then zoom into the last used desktop on that activity. This is the case when multiple activities and multiple virtual desktops are used together, but when multiple activities and only one virtual desktop are used, it doesn't make sense to map a desktop grid to each side of the activity cube, so in that case the activity cube would work visually the same as the desktop cube, the only difference being that what is currently being switched are activities and not virtual desktops.
• Desktop Wall: Basically it would work the same way as described above, that is, scrolling on the "Activity Wall" would trigger the "Desktop Grid" of the current activity, then scroll to the next activity's desktop grid, and then zooming into the last used desktop on that activity. When using only one virtual desktop and multiple activities, it would behave visually he same as the desktop wall, only switching activities instead of virtual desktops.

OK, right now you may be asking: "What about activities currently stopped? How does this solution deal with that?" In this case, the effect would stop at the desktop grid (the desktop grid shown in this case would be a "screenshot" of the desktop grid status prior to stopping the activity) instead of zooming into the desktop, and would show a big "Play" button on the center that, when clicked, would resume the activity and then zoom into the last used desktop on that activity.

Maybe it would be nice to implement this options as separate plugins on KWin, so that we could have a 4 separate plugins (Desktop Wall, Desktop Cube, Activity Wall and Activity Cube). This would make possible to use, for example, Desktop Wall and Activity Cube, but disable Activity Wall and Desktop Cube.

I like this idea. Perhaps I would also add options for switching between activities with a counterpart of Alt+Tab function, something like Alt+ left right arrow or whatever and have the same view options like with Alt+tab. It is already possible to add keyboard shortcut for present activity switcher but I guess my proposal would be more visually appealing.
As an option, for those who don't use alt+tab shortcut to switch between applications - I use traditional task list on panel - would be great to assign alt+tab to switching between activities.

By the way I came across another idea about switching between activities:
http://kde-look.org/content/show.php/Ac ... ent=147428