[jorvi]

I really hate that at some point in the past, KDE developers decided that they hated how deeply intuitive virtual desktops are and deprecated them in favor of something deeply unintuitive (Activities). Any issue or complaint mentioning it is shot down with "you're holding it wrong."

Please just give virtual desktops first class support and lets forget about the Activities experiment. Most users hate it.

The attitude regarding it is about as bad as Gnome forcing Overview on everyone, refusing to provide a first party dock or lightweight launcher. Despite almost every distro and 95% of Gnome users immediately installing Dash to Dock.

[LargoLasskhyfv]

Plasma/KDE's virtual desktops are working for me, as 3x3, 4x4 would be too small in the widget which shows in the 'taskbar', which is only 24 pixels high, here.

Took me some time and asking in their irc-channel, but actually the basic setup is super-simple, and was too 'intuitive' for an old greybeard like me :-)

You right-click on the launcher icon, or the systray and "Add or Manage Widgets", then a window appears where you can pick all sorts of widgets in a bar to the left, which then appear in a subwindow to the right. You just want the Pager, and remove any instances of that Activities Pager thing, if it is/they are already present(because you can have multiple instances in different places(leftover from earlier tries, maybe)).

What I didn't get was that you can pick that pager-widget from the subwindow, and move it anywhere you want it to in that whole taskbar-panel(outside the edit window!), by holding the mousebutton down(drag), until it is exactly where you want it, and then releasing the mouse-botton(drop).

And then "Exit Edit Mode" in the still open window, which then closes. That's all there is to it.

(Similar to how you customize the appearance of Firefox)

From then on you can configure the pager by right clicking onto it, and virtual desktops in system settings like you want them. Maybe having it appear larger with some key-combo, or whatever.

During the time I cursed it, I discovered the activity thing isn't really active anymore, they just let it there for the people who want/like it, meanwhile the real virtual desktop thing didn't get much attention, but that may change in the future?

Hopefully?

[LargoLasskhyfv]

Edit: Actually the most logic sequence of things to configure would be to first go into System Settings -> Window Management -> Virtual Desktops and configure how much of them you want, and how they should be arranged.

Then activate and position the Pager like I described above, and after that how it presents them.

Nonetheless I'm thinking that could be more integrated, and the pager could be larger, when howering the mouse pointer over it.

[bxparks]

I'm not familiar with the Gnome terminologies. Is Overview the one where they removed all the desktop icons, breaking 40 years of GUI conventions going back to the 1970s? (It's impossible to do a search on a product called "Overview".) I blew away Gnome after that, installed Mint MATE (now Cinnamon), and vowed to never touch Gnome again.

[jorvi]

Overview is when you press the Super ('Windows') key.

What appears is an unholy amalgamation of a launcher, a workspace strip, a window overview, workspace peeking, and a dock.

Worse yet is that every time you go in or out of this overview, an animation plays, making things fly and animate everywhere constantly, whenever you want to take any action.

Whenever someone points out to Gnome developers that most people only want to open a launcher to type "52*93" or find a contact, that they just want to mouse over a dock to have a lightweight way to see if an application is open (and to switch to it), they get irate and tell you their vision is vastly superior.

Gnome could be pretty great if the developers their attitude to their users wants and the feedback on their issue tracker wasn't extreme snark and "actually we are right". Even if clear UI defects are pointed out, no, in fact they are right.

The Gnome peoples also frustrate any attempt at improving Wayland at a more rapid clip.

There is a reason why Valve went with KDE. KDE has its own set of problems, but at least they are receptive, cooperative and friendly. I genuinely hope Valve puts enough money into KDE that Gnome with its high and mighty attitude gets completely railroaded.

[bxparks]

Sounds awful. Luckily we still have other options. I hope I never have to use GNOME again.

[johannesrexx]

We put a beautiful wallpaper on the Desktop. Ahhhh.

Along comes a Luddite and puts icons on it, totally ruining its beauty. For fsck's sake! Just No.

Thankfully, along comes GNOME and it just says No.

I agree.

[bxparks]

If you want a pristine desktop, don't put icons there. If I want to put icons on my desktop, it's none of your f'ing business.

[sho_hn]

> Any issue or complaint mentioning it is shot down with "you're holding it wrong."

I don't think this is true. Speaking as an upstream dev, we've never been very happy with Activities, either.

https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-workspace/-/issues/35

Clearly you've had some interaction that upset you and I apologize for that, but I've never come across any Plasma dev who felt we nailed that one (and I wrote large parts of the panels, the menu, the icon desktop, etc.) I was genuinely surprised by your comment.

[jorvi]

To be honest, this is like.. 5 years back? Maybe more. But I don't switch DEs that often.

It's funny to see the two things that prompted the discussion (naming desktops and per-desktop wallpapers) come up heavily under that issue you linked.

Like I mentioned in another comment, I like that KDE devs are much more constructive than Gnome devs. In that issue you can clearly see you're asking users to rephrase their feedback so it is more useful.

With Gnome, I've for example opened an issue for something that isn't according to visual HIG practices. Implementing this would lead to more visual clarity and it would look better to boot. I got told that no, actually they know better. It was pretty clear that they thought that if code or design originated from their shop, there could be no (better) alternative.

When I linked and gave mockup examples I got snarked, and when I snarked back I immediately got dressed down for rule violation by some mod figure that completely ignored their dev's initial snark. Just very, very unpleasant people.

Apologies for the rant haha. Anyway, thanks for linking that and for responding!