"Mobile devices that adapt to who you are, reflecting what you are doing when you are doing it. This concept is at the heart of the Plasma Active user experience. Plasma Active One was released in October 2011, providing early adopters the first opportunity to experience Activities on a tablet. Since then, the design and development team behind this open source touch interface has been hard at work on an update. The fruits of their labor were released today, December 14, 2011 as Plasma Active Two."
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Member since:2006-08-17
The vast majority of people are not even remotely that organized that they will create activities for different projects and connect their files and web pages and relevant apps together.
Don´t worry about them ... they won´t even know activities are there to get the best out of their tablet using experience.. they will still live their happy lives toying aroung with their single activity tablets...
Now, as for the rest of us, those who know about activities, how they work, why are they there, how to make good use of them and squeeze our desktops dry to their´s last drop ... well: we do care, a lot!
Start worring about activities the they someone points a gun to your head and forces you to use them ... or the day someone leaves you with no choice but to deal with them ( should that day ever come ) ...
But, please, for the time being just let it flow ... there´s a whole lot of people that does understand activities and the paradign behind them, use them on a daily basis and have greatly improved their whole desktop experience 
Best Regards.
Member since:2010-04-21
While I can see a benefit to activities, and I do try to use them myself, I fail miserably in adding them to my productivity:
1) if an activity is closed, and a program that was opened in that activity still resides in the system tray, opening that program will relaunch the activity that opened it: this is utterly wrong. Either the activity should remove it from the system tray on stopping the activity, or it should just open the window in the current activity. The result is a slow desktop that behaves badly and incoherently (coherence is one of their main thing of kde now isn't it?)
2) switching between activities is a pain in the ass, there used to be a alt+tab kindoff shortcut, but I can't find it anymore, and clicking every time on an icon to have a slow plasma (4-core system with 6gig of ram...) panel show up to click on a new icon just to switch to a different activity?
3) there's no visual meaning to activities, i.e. take webos or it's desktop counterpart gnome 3, a new activity has a meaning there, I know that in kde in each activity you can have different numbers of desktops, but how does a human being keep track of 16 different activities with each different numbers of desktops... rejoice the chaos created by order.
4) manually changing per window rule settings to tell a program it belongs to this or that activity, or even to multiple is just not productive and slow.
5) programs like opera do have a problem with this behavior, if you have two opera instances each in a different desktop, and you close one of these activities to later open them up again, guess what, opera will open a new window but not in the correct activity
Sure activities have potential, but after two+ years of development it's still not useful. The only reason I'm staying is because gnome 3 does not have the right programs, a task bar is useful (even with their desktop paradigm) and the (albeit slow) most functional window manager remains kwin.
Edited 2011-12-17 08:48 UTC
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Member since:
2005-09-21
Yep. Not even on the tablet. I've said from the beginning that the whole concept of activities is a mistake. The vast majority of people are not even remotely that organized that they will create activities for different projects and connect their files and web pages and relevant apps together. I have yet to see even a convincing example of how it might work, or why that is in any way better than organizing things in traditional ways (in folders).