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Comment by gnull | Hacker News Reader

> It is easy to get distracted when you do many different things on the same device. Think of rooms as profiles but for the same person. You can have different rooms based on what you do and arrange them with things for only that purpose. Maybe change the wallpaper to something related to set the mood.

This is something I've been looking for in other DEs, but never found.

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KDE has "activities"

To date, no one has successfully explained to me what is the benefit of activities over multiple virtual desktops. Would you give it a try?

Activities will get you things like:

- different task bar layouts for different activities

- different desktop widget layouts for different activities

- you can associate files with activities and Dolphin has a `currentactivity://` scheme (tho I do wish this could be extended to apps. As of now if you only want an app to be in a certain activity you've got some window rules to setup)

They live in an awkward place, since virtual desktops are a Linux WM thing while activities are just a KDE plasma thing.

I am not sure what is interesting in having different task layout but feel free to educate me.

As for widgets, I am still struggling to see the point of widgets (regardless of platform, it is the same for mobiles). Usually if I am in front of my computer screen, I will hace apps opened that will hide any kind if widgets. Or is it for people using 8k 120cm diagonals screens?

Not sure what's hard to imagine about different sets of icons in your taskbar. Quick example, your personal taskbar might have:

- Steam

- Youtube

- Plex

While for work you might have:

- A terminal

- Work chat

- Work ticketing system

- Your editor

I'll just link to a page about Activities since I'm just rehashing them: https://docs.kde.org/stable5/en/plasma-desktop/plasma-deskto...

This is a step in the right direction, if someone could come up with a simple enough but extensible enough de-facto standard for multiple “profile”, our lives would be immensely enriched.

KDE already had per-virtual-desktop backgrounds before that feature was removed in favor of activities. There is no reason different widgets (both desktop and panel) couldn't have been added to virtual desktops instead.

Others in the thread have already provided explanations of the features, but I would like to highlight how I personally utilize KDE Activities as a use case. I rely on it to create dedicated spaces for different projects or clients, complete with their own distinct virtual desktops and settings. This functionality has been invaluable to me, particularly when sharing screens with individuals involved in specific projects. This separation of tasks and switching between them is pretty seamless.

You can use both at the same time. Each activity gets its own set of virtual desktops. I use activities to switch between low-distraction and high-distraction modes; combined with a 2x2 grid of virtual desktops, I have certain important things on the north-east virtual desktop on all activities, but other things will be only in one or the other activity.

Activities are virtual desktops with per desktop widgets and desktop settings.

You either use them instead of standard virtual desktops or if you need sets of sets of applications in addition to eg both work and home activities have desktops 1..n with different windows.

Here is one example:

I use virtual desktops to separate apps when developing (1 for terminal, 2 for the app, 3 for docs, 4 for the IDE, 5 for additional tools). I switch between them every few seconds sometimes, so the exact numbering is important.

With KDE activities, it's nice to be able to have two fully separate projects (different customers or contexts) open at the same time, while keeping their respective virtual desktop arrangements.

I am also interested in this. I've also never been able to fully grok what 'Activities' are, though I've never gone all in on learning them.

I was just thinking the other day I’d also really like that for my terminal history, especially since I’ve often worked at “bring your own device” sized companies.

You might be interested in https://github.com/ellie/atuin

> Atuin replaces your existing shell history with a SQLite database, and records additional context for your commands.

This is why I read HN comments. Some hidden gem always surfaces. Never seen this mentioned on any CLI awesome lists.

Atuin is outstanding. I've barely scratched the surface of its features, but it's already made a significant impact on my command line usage.

There's also McFly which is similar. I have yet to try Atuin so I can't say which is better.

I've been doing that for a decade+ now and it's marvelous.

I key everything off a shell variable called SESSION, and have a few scripts to set that before spinning up a screen/tmux instance if I don't already have one running for the context in question.

There's a somewhat dated snapshot of some of my config files (relevant and otherwise) at https://github.com/dlthomas/config-files

Seconded. I’d love this in MacOS. A child comment here was talking about different docks and menus and such. This would be great for work vs home.

How is this different from virtual desktops?

What is a virtual desktop?

It sometimes goes by different names, such as 'workspace' or 'screen'; but these days I think every major desktop OS has these.

It's just the name for "where the windows go".

So you might have your terminal full screen on one virtual desktop, and your browser on another virtual desktop, and use shortcuts to navigate from one to the other.

Virtual desktop is nerdspeak.

Room is normspeak.

All those faux real world analogies is what keeps normies afraid of computers.

Fvwm and Ctwm did that for ages.

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