Seigo: activities as homonyms

However, plasmoids is such a cute name, once it was out there, it kind of took on a life of its own, and most people once aware of the term and its meaning seem to use it. I know I do (but in the plasmoids/widgets construct, with an explanation that a plasmoid is simply a plasma widget, when I'm addressing the uninitiated).

AKA "kicker applet" for the folks who used kde3, tho there's more variety and flexibility with plasmoids, since they work on either the desktop or the panel. Which leads to the more generic simply "panel/desktop applet". Or more generically still, simply "applet", possibly adding, "for use in plasma".

Of course then one has to deal with "What is plasma?" But that's simple enough as well. Plasma is simply kde's combined desktop and panel UI. For kde3 users, it's the combination of kdesktop and kicker, with additional flexibility and modernized for kde4. For MS Windows users, it's comparable to the Explorer desktop shell. Or simply call it the desktop shell, or simply the desktop.

Within that context, "plasmoids" then become, pretty self-evidently, the little applets that run in plasma, the desktop shell.

That part's reasonably easy to explain, because there are existing parallel concepts in both MS and Unix GUIs (and Apple too, but I'm not familiar enough with them to attempt a named comparison) going back at least a decade and a half now, to MS Windows 95, with earlier versions going back much farther than that. But with the concept of virtual desktops we start losing a few people, because that hasn't been so common outside of X based GUIs, and advancing to kde4/plasma's concept of activities, we've lost pretty much everyone, because it's pretty much new ground now, without parallels in the existing computing environment to fall back on for descriptive aids.

Really, while I sort of understand the kde4 activity concept and am an avid kde user as I have been for nearly a decade now, I can't say that I use it much yet, One of the reasons I'm not using it much here is that I run a dual screen setup, 1920x1080 stacked for 1920x2160. That's both a problem for activities as currently implemented and gives me more screen real estate thus lessening the need for them. It's a problem because as originally implemented, an activity was confined to a single display, so two displays meant two activities displayed simultaneously and switching activities while keeping the displays synced was a big problem. That has been partially fixed for 4.5, which now at least once setup, considers the full current desktop over one or more displays a single activity, but there's still definite rough edges to how activities work on desktops spread over more than a single display, and with the pressure being less as well due to the same multiple displays, plus the fact that they don't really have the session stuff working properly yet, I've not really felt the need to use multiple activities.

Based on that and especially based on the early kde4 history where a *VERY* clearly still very broken alpha, not even beta, plasma, was released as "ready for ordinary users" (we're talking 4.2 and 4.3 here, where that claim was made), I must admit that I'm somewhat leery of how all this activity session management stuff is going to work -- or given past kde4/plasma history, NOT work but STILL be released as "ready for ordinary use" well before its time -- but I *DO* expect it to get there in the end, and become something others will ultimately be copying, as the technology matures.

Duncan

My thought though, is that the GNOME and KDE teams feel too much pressure to innovate -perhaps partly as a reaction to the old accusation that FLOSS can only copy and not produce new ideas. I would personally prefer to see them doing existing things well (what was that Cray quote about never being the first to do something?) than innovating at any price, but of course I recognise that other people may feel differently.

But is Alt-Tab part of your workflow? If so, the stuff on the desktop could become useful to you. In the 'Task Switcher' config page in KDE 4.5, enable 'Include Desktop', then you can alt-tab to the desktop like any other app.