KDE 4.5 Desktop Activities Bring New Meaning to Organization

“KDE 4.5 brings to the table plenty of useful, functional,
innovative features. One of those very features is the Desktop
Activity. Although many scoffed at the idea (even tried to get the
feature pulled), those same naysayers are (hopefully) glad their
requests were not followed. Why? The KDE Desktop Activities feature
is a great new desktop metaphor that takes the Linux desktop to new
levels of organization.

“Prior to Desktop Activities a user could have multiple desktops
(thanks to the ever-present KDE pager). You could use one desktop
for productivity, one for networking, one for graphics, one for
fun, or whatever categories you needed. This was a great way to
keep yourself organized. The KDE team saw something that no one
else seemed to see — that the Pager idea could be greatly
improved.

“As it stood, the Linux pager could have particular windows
associated with it, but when you added a particular Plasmoid
(Desktop Widget) that widget would be found on every desktop. So,
what if you could associate widgets with particular desktop
activities? And then, what if you could associate particular
windows (or even files) to a particular desktop activity? What if
you could give your desktops truly separate identities? And what if
each activity had multiple workspaces of its own?”

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