Re: Customizing the desktops
Are you on 4.4? I definitely don't get the fancy panels option.
In theory it's relatively straightforwards, I was maybe just saying it awkwardly but exposing, in my language, the awkwardness that's going on behind the scenes. I have two monitors, but although Linux is aware that they are separate monitors it treats them as a single screen. Thus browser windows can span between them and etc.
The problem is that the way the KDE4 devs have designed desktops versus activities is somewhat schizophrenic (or in other words, they don't seem to care about multi-display setups like mine...it's gotten much better though, until 4.2 plasma would just crash whenever I tried to move the panel between monitors). So each monitor counts as an "activity" and I can set all the Plasma Workspace Desktop Settings individually, but this leads to several usage scenarios that Plasma seems to have been designed completely oblivious of.
For one, if you add an Activity Bar widget to switch activities you now can switch to the same activity as the other monitor. Guess what happens if you switch one monitor to the activity that the other monitor is currently on? Yup, Plasma crashes.
The second usage scenario I've run into is that Plasma completely stumbles over the "different activities for each virtual desktop" feature. In past versions it has simply crashed; once I got home today I gave things another whirl, and I'm happy to report that it doesn't usually crash now
However, the feature remains so buggy it might as well not exist. For one . . . well, a picture is worth a thousand words, and this is what generally happens if I zoom out, enable the activity-per-desktop option then zoom back in:
[img width=400 height=150]http://www.ualberta.ca/~keithz/misc/resource/broken_desktop_1.png[/img]
If you think about it it's doomed from the start, eh? There's an activity per monitor, which thus means two paired activities per screen (or "virtual desktop") in theory when the option is enabled. But the zoom-back-in buttons are for each individual activity, not for the pairs of activities. Plus the Activity Bar widget's functionality is disabled while activities are linked to desktops, so one can't even manually correct which activity is on which monitor on which virtual desktop.
To make matters worse, something that's either lazy coding or an outright bug fouls things up further. I've managed to skip the doomed zooming-back-in stage by zooming out to get the option, opening the plasma settings dialog (shouldn't that just be, or at least also be, in KControl/SystemSettings somewhere instead of hidden away?) and then zooming back in before I click on the option and hit okay. But if you think about it it's not surprising what goes wrong next. When Plasma is pairing activites and desktops, because there are four virtual desktops . . . it only creates four activities. But since there's two activities per virtual desktop, that means half of the activities are missing. Precisely which half seems to be random; on my current attempt it's both monitors on virtual desktops 2 and 4. I had created a spare activity in my fiddling (after having wiped the config files yet again) so on virtual desktop 2 the right-hand monitor has a plasma desktop, but otherwise it's blankness (cannot add widgets, and no cashew to zoom out to then zoom back in on an actual activity even if one is created; Catch-22).
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....sorry if that all was long-winded and ranty. I'm just seriously disappointed that, years later, KDE 4 STILL isn't ready for my main desktop computer. And I really do mean disappointed rather than angry; KDE 4 works perfectly fine on pretty much every other computer I've thrown it at, and I've done that to quite a few. I'm a KDE lover, not a KDE fighter! And I'd love to be able to really use this fancy KDE 4 thing on my primary desktop. But the further we get from getting meaningful results from editing text files, and the further we go trying to depend on GUI drag-and-drop settings and automatic configs, the more my idiosyncratic setup causes the DEs to stumble.
Originally posted by toad
If you want to add a panel you get the choice of whether you want a "normal" or a "fancy" one 
Originally posted by toad
And I don't even get your two screens per virtual desktop 
Sounds mind boggling to say the least!
Sounds mind boggling to say the least!The problem is that the way the KDE4 devs have designed desktops versus activities is somewhat schizophrenic (or in other words, they don't seem to care about multi-display setups like mine...it's gotten much better though, until 4.2 plasma would just crash whenever I tried to move the panel between monitors). So each monitor counts as an "activity" and I can set all the Plasma Workspace Desktop Settings individually, but this leads to several usage scenarios that Plasma seems to have been designed completely oblivious of.
For one, if you add an Activity Bar widget to switch activities you now can switch to the same activity as the other monitor. Guess what happens if you switch one monitor to the activity that the other monitor is currently on? Yup, Plasma crashes.
The second usage scenario I've run into is that Plasma completely stumbles over the "different activities for each virtual desktop" feature. In past versions it has simply crashed; once I got home today I gave things another whirl, and I'm happy to report that it doesn't usually crash now
However, the feature remains so buggy it might as well not exist. For one . . . well, a picture is worth a thousand words, and this is what generally happens if I zoom out, enable the activity-per-desktop option then zoom back in:[img width=400 height=150]http://www.ualberta.ca/~keithz/misc/resource/broken_desktop_1.png[/img]
If you think about it it's doomed from the start, eh? There's an activity per monitor, which thus means two paired activities per screen (or "virtual desktop") in theory when the option is enabled. But the zoom-back-in buttons are for each individual activity, not for the pairs of activities. Plus the Activity Bar widget's functionality is disabled while activities are linked to desktops, so one can't even manually correct which activity is on which monitor on which virtual desktop.
To make matters worse, something that's either lazy coding or an outright bug fouls things up further. I've managed to skip the doomed zooming-back-in stage by zooming out to get the option, opening the plasma settings dialog (shouldn't that just be, or at least also be, in KControl/SystemSettings somewhere instead of hidden away?) and then zooming back in before I click on the option and hit okay. But if you think about it it's not surprising what goes wrong next. When Plasma is pairing activites and desktops, because there are four virtual desktops . . . it only creates four activities. But since there's two activities per virtual desktop, that means half of the activities are missing. Precisely which half seems to be random; on my current attempt it's both monitors on virtual desktops 2 and 4. I had created a spare activity in my fiddling (after having wiped the config files yet again) so on virtual desktop 2 the right-hand monitor has a plasma desktop, but otherwise it's blankness (cannot add widgets, and no cashew to zoom out to then zoom back in on an actual activity even if one is created; Catch-22).
------------------------
....sorry if that all was long-winded and ranty. I'm just seriously disappointed that, years later, KDE 4 STILL isn't ready for my main desktop computer. And I really do mean disappointed rather than angry; KDE 4 works perfectly fine on pretty much every other computer I've thrown it at, and I've done that to quite a few. I'm a KDE lover, not a KDE fighter! And I'd love to be able to really use this fancy KDE 4 thing on my primary desktop. But the further we get from getting meaningful results from editing text files, and the further we go trying to depend on GUI drag-and-drop settings and automatic configs, the more my idiosyncratic setup causes the DEs to stumble.
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