So Plasma has Activities, which is something I noticed a while back. I haven’t really found any use for it other than maybe having a different desktop layout so I was wondering what everyone else used it for.
No shade to the people who added it, just curious.
I use to split personal and work stuff.
Mostly just change desktop wallpaper, have different pinned apps, and have some apps forced to start on specific activity using kwin rules.
And I sometimes also on top of that use workspaces, for additional split if different set of work/personal activities like switching between projects or leaving chat on one and IDE on another.
So it’s almost like a simple 2x2 workspace grid but with additional window/taskbar rules.
An easy one is “Personal” and “Work.” I havent figured out how to combine it with Firefox profiles yet, but basically: instead of having to have two entirely separate user accounts, you can have Activities instead, and can hot-toggle between them.
I would want personal and work separated as users, though. Work requires proprietary tools I don’t want to give read access to my personal files. And not being able to hot-toggle between them is a feature.
School and personal then. Or gaming and general. Or combinations of them. If you do hobby programming, you could have “dev” as one.
Use Activity Aware Firefox and set it as your default browser.
For nothing. Absolutely nothing.
If they could be used to switch users or in any other way actually containerize desktop sessions, they could be useful for something.
I’d also go for “completely disabled”.
I switch between Main, Recording, and Gaming. Apart from backgrounds I have some apps specifically visible in that Activity, and also have a filtered desktop folder for each (each Activity has files that are only relevant to that activity). I did a video about my switching at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wq-7KEeH7_U and how it differs from virtual desktops.
I have a bit of an unusual workflow, making use of 40+ workspaces, so I use Activities basically like meta-workspaces.
You have my curiosity, I wanna know your workflow.
I use them instead of virtual desktops - each with a specific hotkey, and some with customized pinned apps.
I have …
General: Email, shopping, etc. Gaming Media Two Work activities - a primary, and a secondary for when I need to compartmentalize different ongoing tasks Other - for anything transitory that doesn’t fit in the others.
I realize this could largely be done with virtual desktops, though I don’t think you can have a different pinned app loadout for each?
The downside to setting things up this way is when I restart my computer, it seems to randomly decide which browser windows go in each activity. Also, with apps that I use across them (like Notion), I have to go hunting for which activity it opened in. To get around the issue of splitting Firefox across different profiles, I just use two browsers. Firefox for work, and Firedragon for personal stuff. They share the same external password manager, so it’s pretty seamless.
In the past I used it together with KTimeTracker. It’s a solution, of the many available… Sadly, none was really optimal IMHO
I have one for when I’m doing a presentation that customised for zero interruptions. The other is for everything else.
