Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Relocating notification popup KDE-4.5

[Alan McKinnon]

Apparently, though unproven, at 18:35 on Tuesday 30 November 2010, Alex 
Schuster did opine thusly:

> Alan McKinnon writes:
> > I "get" KDE (mostly) but some stuff is just bizarre:
> >
> > Activities. wtf are those?
>
> I tink they are really cool, although I don't use them, and probably never
> will. But I'm not the average user. I have six virtual desktops (current
> screenshots are at http://www.wonkology.org/comp/desktop/2010-11-11/ ),
> each one has its purpose. For each window you can define the desktop it
> will run on. You change the desktop, and you get new windows displayed,
> while the plasmoids stay the same.
>
> With activities it's the other way around. You switch the activity, and the
> windows stay the same, but you get different plasmoids.

That's a decent explanation, thanks a lot. I can see how some folks would like 
that and why it's been coded.

You assume right, I'm a multiple-desktop-with-a-pager sort of guy. 6 desktops 
and I know where I like to launch things. I mostly don't have plasmoids on the 
desktop, mostly because I never see the desktop :-)  I usually maximize most 
windows (kontact, amarok) or split the screen 65/35 between a browser and 
konsole. To do action X, I launch the app that does that action and most of my 
work is in a browser and terminal

I now do have two plasmoids on the desktop - a clock that shows when the 
screensaver comes up, and notifications, which displays the popup above all 
regular windows.

I guess I'm just not into all this new shiny glitzy bouncey stuff. If I wanted 
bling, I'd be using a mac ;-)




>
> For example, you have your default activity active, with some plasmoids,
> whatever they are. Then you want to inspect why the system is suddenly
> being slow, so you switch to your admin activity, which has all kinds of
> system monitors and loggers you normally prefer to not show up. I think
> that's the idea. I would just switch to desktop1 where I have some of
> these plasmoids, but that is my approach. Others seem to like these
> activities.
>
> A 3rd activity might show some newstickers and web plasmoids. While I would
> just switch to my desktop3, where I have this stuff.
>
> And a 4th activity could display folder views of various locations. You
> don't care about them normally, and use the desktop space for other things
> you like more. But when you want access to those folders, they are just one
> keystroke away.
>
> I would be surprised if you'd start using activities, I guess you're more
> the multiple desktop guy. But hey, as long as you don't add other
> activities, you don't have to care about them.
>
> I think there are further plans, like applications starting and quitting
> automatically when switching activities. So you put your desktop into
> different modes, according to the task you are currently doing. I'm doing
> all this stuff in parallel, so I just sort it on different desktops.
>
> There is much development going on currently, this stuff is still evolving.
> In 4.5.2, you had to use one activity per virtual desktop if you wanted to
> have different plasmoids on different desktops, or different wallpapers.
> This has changed, you can have different plasmoids on each desktop now
> (although I'm missing the 'sticky' option to have _some_ plasmoids on all
> desktops), and also different wallpapers. But who knows how this stuff will
> have evolved until KDE 4.7.
>
> 	Wonko

-- 
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com