Most users of KDE Plasma have probably heard of Activities [1], but few ever use them. The trouble is that, although Activities have been a feature of Plasma for almost a decade, detailed examples of how to use them are few and far between. The result is that one of the most useful expansions of the classic desktop metaphor remains neglected, leaving users struggling along with desktop environments that are barely adequate for modern systems.

Classic desktops with a menu, panel, and workspace worked well when 200MB hard drives were the norm. However, as systems have grown, users have been struggling with a growing problem. Either their desktop is so crowded with launchers that finding the one they need becomes difficult, or else it contains a general set of icons that may not be ideal for any specific task. Increasingly, users have become accustomed to launching applications from the menu and leaving the desktop a blank space – a solution that is less than ideal because modern menus have also become unwieldy.

Activities remove these difficulties by removing the limitation of a single desktop. Each Activity is a separate desktop, with its own set of launchers for applications, files, and URLs, customized for a single purpose. Since any purpose rarely requires more than a dozen launchers, each resource can be quickly located.

Just as importantly, each Activity provides a specific rather than a general set of resources. All of these resources are a single click away, providing immediate access without the distraction of drilling down a menu. Activities themselves can be reached by keyboard shortcuts or by adding the Activities Bar widget to the desktop (Figure 1).

Figure 1: The Activity Bar widget is a convenient way to switch between Activities. The current Activity is highlighted – here, the default desktop.

Although users may be unaware of the fact, Plasma's default desktop is an Activity. For some users, this single Activity is all they need. However, those who want to organize themselves more efficiently can add Activities by selecting Activities from the desktop toolkits (Figure 2).

Figure 2: You can view Activities from the desktop toolkit.

In Plasma 5, an Activity can have two layouts. A Desktop layout is one to which you can add launchers freely. By contrast, with a Folder View, the entire desktop displays the contents of a directory. This directory can be added to contain launchers, like the default desktop, or else a directory displaying files and directories as in a file manager, as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3: In Plasma 5, each Activity can have a Desktop or Folder View layout.

And how can these features be used? A flippant, if truthful answer would be any way you imagine. However, if you are like most users, the following case studies should help you jump start your imagination.

Full-Screen Applications

Like virtual workspaces, Activities are a convenient place to run applications like a web browser or a terminal that you want to run full-screen. The difference is that, in Plasma 5, virtual workspaces cannot be customized individually. With Activities, you can set up applications permanently so that they can run at a click.

Organizing Tasks

You can limit the number of icons on a workspace using a filter, but having a separate Activity for a task reduces the necessary amount of fiddling with controls. Probably, task-based Activities are the most common. In fact, when Activities were newer, one of the examples circulating was a sample by Aaron Seigo of an Activity for planning a holiday. If I remember, it included links to airlines and hotels, as well as websites about historical sites and tourists attractions at his destination.

Figure 4 shows the icons on the Activity that I have set up for writing. On the left are the tools I use for writing: Bluefish and LibreOffice. Bluefish is placed on the left because it is the one I use the most, since most of the editors for which I write prefer articles in plain text or with minimal HTML formatting.

Figure 4: An Activity set up for writing, showing launchers for applications on the left, URLS in the middle, and files on the right.

In the middle are URLS for online resources I use frequently: an Old English dictionary for translation, a rhyming dictionary, and a thesaurus. I do not include a general purpose dictionary, because I make a point of never using a word I am unable to spell, but others might find such a link useful.

On the far right are directories I use for housekeeping. The income-2017 folder includes invoices I have submitted and a spreadsheet listing everything I have written for the year and how much I am owed for each article, with separate columns for American and Canadian dollars and Euros. The 2017 folder contains the actual stories, both as I submitted them and as I revised them at editors' requests.

Originally, my Writing Activity also included a link to a screen capture Activity. However, I soon realized that running the applications I was writing about in the same workspace as my writing tools cluttered the desktop and slowed me down. These days, I run the applications in a separate Activity.

For instance, since I write a regular command-line column for Linux Pro Magazine , I have an Activity named CLI that displays one launcher for screen capture, and one for Konsole, KDE's terminal application.

For larger projects, I often have separate Activities. When I was writing my book Designing with LibreOffice [2], I had an Activity that included LibreOffice, which I was using both for writing and as a reference, a screen capture app, and links to the chapter file directory and the chapter graphics directory.

Arranging Widgets

Plasma's widgets can be placed in the panel, but you can also place them on the desktop, where they are always open and readable at a glance. Desktop widgets include useful items such as the trash can, or, in the Plasma 5 releases, a full-screen menu. However, you probably want to view some widgets only occasionally, and too many widgets can get in the way and can be started accidentally.

One solution is to place all your desktop widgets on to a single Activity. The example in Figure 5 starts with hardware and system monitors on the two left-hand columns, such as RAM, disk usage, and CPU Activity. In the middle column, there are everyday utilities, such as a calculator and measurement conversion app, with a system update on the bottom. In the far right column, there is information that you might want when logging in for the first time during the day, such as a world clock, a weather app, and recent KDE news. By placing these utilities on their own Activity, you can take advantage of them without them getting in the way of your other computing.

Figure 5: Another use for an Activity is for displaying desktop widgets in an orderly fashion.

Note, though, that Figure 5 is taken from a machine with 32GB RAM. On smaller machines, a dozen widgets constantly polling hardware and system resources or connecting to online sources can easily slow a system to a crawl. In such cases, you need to be more selective.

Your Own Chromebook

As you probably know, Chromebooks are laptops that use online applications rather than local ones. Chromebooks have become popular because of their low price, and also because storing resources online is easier for those using several machines or collaborating with others.

You can create your own version of a Chromebook in an Activity that contains only URLs. The Activity can contain links to Google Docs and Google Calendar for general productivity, Remember The Milk for to-do lists, and Google Drive for file storage and sharing (Figure 6). If necessary, you can also add Activities customized to use local applications as well.

Figure 6: Launchers for an Activity for using cloud applications – a kind of do-it-yourself Chromebook.

URL Scrapbook

Web browsers have bookmarks so that users can easily find links they want to use later. However, Activities make saving links for later use even easier.

All you need is an Activity with a link to a web browser. When you want to save a URL, drag it to the desktop, and save it with an appropriate name. Group URLS if you need to organize them.

Organizing by Location

Although Activities are usually organized by task or project, another way to organize them is by location. For example, if you use your computer at work, home, and school, you could create Activities for each of these locations.

On the Work Activity, you could add launchers for LibreOffice, the directory containing your work files, a to-do list, and URLS for your company's or department's Slack channels. On the School Activity, you might include BasKet, KDE's note-taking application, and a Calendar for assignment and exam dates. On the Home Activity, the launchers could include your favorite games and the URLs for Google+ and Twitter, making them accessible with a single click.

Activities Vs. Virtual Desktops

These examples demonstrate some of the basic ways that Activities can expand and improve your desktop environment. However, if you are like most people, you might be uncertain how Activities differ from virtual desktops, except for having different tools for navigating them. The difference is especially obscure in distributions that are still using Plasma 4, in which virtual desktops can be configured independently – a feature that has yet to find its way into Plasma 5.

The answer is that Activities have the same relation to virtual desktops as directories have to files. In other words, they are a higher level of organization. Each Activity has its own virtual desktops and, in Plasma 5 is more specialized and customizable than its virtual desktops.

Making full use of Activities means analyzing how you use computers. Often, it means structuring desktop environments in terms of tasks, rather than applications. It can also mean much more customization of wallpaper and launcher icons than the classical desktop requires.

However, like all customization, the payoff is an increased ability to work and navigate more efficiently and with fewer distractions. Activities require thought and preparation, but once you start using them, you are likely to feel half-crippled when using a desktop environment that lacks them.