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.
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 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.
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 mentioned this in my own top-level comment, but I just use different browsers for work and personal. Firefox for work, and my distro’s fork for personal. That keeps those nicely separate.
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.
I have one for when I’m doing a presentation that customised for zero interruptions. The other is for everything else.
In the past I used it together with KTimeTracker. It’s a solution, of the many available… Sadly, none was really optimal IMHO
