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Right now activities have been made easier to use and I hope in the next release they will become more powerful. I was thinking that activities can be saved, uploaded and downloaded.

In this way you have predefined activities targeted at a certain task. User can modify which parts of an activity can be saved: the appearance (wallpaper, theme), desktop elements (widgets/panels), documents and/or apps. Users can for example download activities from KDE Look that targets at the internet, wine, the command line, multimedia, system monitoring and so on.

I really like this idea. I think this will help simplify the setup of activities, as well as help propagate the usage of activities as they were intended - to be an area for doing a particular task with only those applications associated with that task.

The main roadblocks to moving forward with making this intention the default/expected behavior are: first, users are too used to having a(n activity independent) panel with (a menu and) launchers for any applications that they ever use, irrespective of activities. Second, it takes so much time and effort to set up activities with the applications and plasmoids you want, so most users don't go through the effort (and fall back to the panel with menu and app launchers).
This idea will definitely help lessen the second roadblock as users will have access to predefined activities, so they won't have to spend as much time setting up activities from scratch (though many will still want to do some fine-tuning, but that's ok).

I like it, since I still think "activities" concept is a waste. Perhaps it would convince me otherwise.

I agree that is a good idea for new user to discover more easily what the activities are for, but isn't it the job of distributions to implement this ?

AGuiFr wrote:I agree that is a good idea for new user to discover more easily what the activities are for, but isn't it the job of distributions to implement this ?

That seems to be kind of a gray area. I think that there are some activity definitions that are cross-distribution (based on kde-specific applications such that for any distribution the tools are available), but there are certainly many that are distribution-specific. I might also expect that if KDE defined a few activities that come with the software collection, that distributions would also follow suit and add their own custom activities as well.

Another item of note is that for the sharing of activity definitions, there would need to be some dependency-checking for both plasmoids/widgets (which can be easily downloaded at the same time as the activity definition) as well as applications (KPackageKit?).

AGuiFr wrote:I agree that is a good idea for new user to discover more easily what the activities are for, but isn't it the job of distributions to implement this ?

No. Especially for those that stick to strictly vanilla upstream packages, such as Slackware and Arch.

Also, it would help a team of users if they could easily get an activity from the Web that is optimized for their project, like a bunch of plasmoids for file transfer and server status to a Web development team, along with a wallpaper with their site's logo.

Developers are in the process of discussing this for KDE 4.6.