Re: [gentoo-user] KDE Activities

[Mick]

On Sunday 28 Dec 2014 07:19:22 Alan McKinnon wrote:
> On 28/12/2014 06:08, Gregory M. Turner wrote:
> > On Saturday 27 December 2014 09:43:47 Peter Humphrey wrote:
> >> Morning list,
> >>
> >> Is there a way to build KDE without its concept of Activities? I find it
> >> an unnecessary complication, which I never use. Any time I found myself
> >> wrestling with it by accident it's caused little other than anger and
> >> frustration.
> >>
> >> No doubt this is just as silly an idea as building KMail without its
> >> database, which also has caused considerable grief.
> >
> > +1
> >
> > Don't understand it.  Don't want to.  Really hate when I press the wrong
> > button, it does some crazy inscrutable bullshit, and I have to figure out
> > how to escape from it with my desktop intact.
> >
> > Probably I just want to check my email, or whatever, and all of a sudden,
> > it's like some ridiculous bridge troll is posing riddles to me and
> > threatening to blow up my desktop if I answer wrong.
> >
> > After quickly ducking this, I'm not optimistic.  This is particularly
> > discouraging: https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=67&t=91160
> >
> > Sounds an awful lot like the cashew/virtuoso/etc.  If history is any
> > guide, they'll never change it, no matter how nicely we ask, nor how
> > carefully we construct the patches to make it optional.
>
> You can't build KDE without activities as far as I can tell, like a
> poster said in the link you provided it's a core feature much like tabs
> in Firefox. You can't "just remove that code" and still have stuff work.
>
> What you can do is make Activities go away and never impinge on your
> life, that's what I do. I've had KDE here for years and like you never
> grokked what it even is when it first hit early in 4.x. I'm a grumpy old
> far, I like my 6 virtual desktops in 2 rows of three, I like to launch
> the apps myself I known I'm going to use now, and I like global session
> management for apps I always use all the time (like Konsole). I don't
> like Activities.
>
> I made them go away and have been using the same KDE config ever since
> quite happily. IIRC all it really took was to remove the icon[1] from
> the panel, and maybe disable some keyboard shortcuts. Activities hasn't
> appeared here for years now, I'd forgotten all about them till this
> thread showed up :-)
>
>
> Anyway, hope this helps
>
>
> [1] The icon is the one with three small overlapping circles IIRC


I seem to recall that Fedora introduced some button/patch/whatever to remove 
or at least hide the desktop toolkit that provides Activities.  I don't know 
if this was back when, or it is still current.

I can see a use case for Activities, when the user undertakes consistently 
repetitive tasks which involve the same tools, files and widgets, in the same 
virtual desktop configuration.  In my case the only applications that I use 
reliably are a multi-tabbed terminal and a mail client.  Everything else 
pretty much 'depends' and invariably I would use it in parallel with my 
terminal, rather than instead of.

I can see though that someone more disciplined than me, who thinks along the 
lines of one task at a time, would probably have use for dekstop Activities.

I have commented before about the disappointment that the KDE4 application 
design has been for me, in terms of KDEPIM.  Since I don't use the KDE desktop 
on my main machine, things like activities don't bother me.

-- 
Regards,
Mick