I have been tinkering with KDE's Activities "feature" and keep running into roadblocks that keep me from working the way I want to work. I do rather like the way that I can customize my "favorites" menu configuration on a per activity basis.

I'm trying to move away from virtual desktops since the KDE folks decided that having different wallpapers for different desktops was no longer an acceptable use of KDE. Using the wallpaper as a visual cue as to what desktop you were on is out the window now unless you jump head-first into Activities.

So I set up "activities" that corresponded to the uses I had for virtual desktops: general browsing, development, testing, windows to remote systems, email, writing documentation, etc. I'm finding that Activities really screws up one's workflow. For example: how does one move activities to other locations without having to drag a shadowy object from one activity to another using the activity manager? The dropdown menu on the title bar seems geared to making the application visible on the current activity and another---or all activities. Then you seem to have to open up the dropdown and un-select the application from the current activity to complete the move. Or you have to remember to right-click on the application's entry in the task manager to do the move. What's the right way? Who knows? Obviously, this is a major paradigm change for everyone that's been using virtual desktops for years and years (Good grief... since the days of FVWM!) but the documentation of how to use these is pretty much non-existent.

What HOWTOs/Tutorial(s) have LQ readers found that demonstrate how using KDE's Activities will make my life complete? I seen a lot of things that are seriously basic, barely mention Activities except that they exist, and never include any practical ways to use them in daily work.

TIA...

I mostly agree with what you say here, rnturn. But let me add a couple of things.
First, it seems "activities" is a solution to a non-existent problem. If it was meant to keep a clear boundary between work and personal activities, then it would mostly be of benefit to those who can take their work computers home with them, who are mostly contractors (am I correct?). But that would be a small minority of workers in or around IT. Other than having that boundary, I don't see much purpose not addressed by virtual desktops.
Second, oh yeah - it was a mistake for KDE to remove the ability to have different wallpapers and plazmoids for each virtual desktop.
And lastly, I first noticed when I played around with Vivaldi for a bit that the browser did not respect that boundary. Fortunately, there was a setting that kept each instance from appearing in more than one activity. Now, since Firefox 61 was released, it has the same problem. Worse, after months of searching I've yet to find any setting to do the same thing. Nor have I found any help with that in the Firefox support forums. Annoying, to say the least.

Hum... I may copy this discussion and send it on to any KDE developers groups I can find.

I've never used them. My computer activities are such that workspaces provide all the segregation of activity that I need.

We used to have a member in my LUG (he moved away) who used them heavily. He put his programming tools in one activity, his gaming tools in another, and so on.

Frankbell, yes, there have been users since activities was implemented, I'm sure. I went to forum.kde.org and saw quite a bit of discussion about them since 2011. However, most all of it seems to show, at best, little enthusiasm or complaint. To be honest, it looks very much to my eyes that any disparaging talk about activities has been, in the immortal words of Bart Simpson's teacher, exmarflagated.

It's been a long time now, but I can't convince myself that KDE developers actually know how the users feel about activities and about the loss of functionality that went along with it. At least, not yet.

I have read that most persons use less than 5% of the features of a word processor, because they don't need them. My guess is that KDE Activities might be like that: a small percentage find them useful, but those who do find them useful really really like them.

As for being a larger commentary on KDE developers and their philosophy, I'm not so sure. They tried something new and it didn't turn out to be very popular. I would rather them give something new a whirl and have it fall flat than give nothing new a whirl. Since I don't use Activities, what others think of them--I hope this doesn't sound too harsh--is irrelevant to me.

For a desktop environment, I prefer KDE to the others. I can be amicable to MATE and Cinnamon, I can use XFCE and LXDE without complaint, and don't get me started on Gnome.

Just my two cents.

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I'm sort of getting used to the whole Activities idea. Well, we'll see if I get used to it. As with any new [ahem] activity, it'll take some time for muscle memory to develop with the new ways of shifting from task to task. I'm still not crazy about the way the Activity Pager works (forcing a single row which eats up a lot of panel space) but at least it's much faster than using the Activity Manager (which changes the order of the activities each time I enter it) and is too slow. What would be really nice is a Ctrl-F8 type of activity display/navigator like one gets when using virtual desktops. And my menus are a mess as a result of my uninformed attempts to set them up on a per activity basis; I have to work on those.

Even though I may grow to like it, I just have this feeling that I'll not be getting the most out of it because its use is so poorly documented. So I appreciate the chiming in here.

I've never used or setup the KDE Activities "feature", and I don't plan to either. I don't see what benefit I would get from it. But I do like KDE itself tho.

I thought the same thing when Activities first appeared (back in openSUSE 12.x, maybe, but definitely in 13.x). That it's taken so long for them to get to where they are surely hasn't helped move their adoption along. Nor has the lack of instructions on their use. (I'd liked to have seen some examples of setting up Activities and not feel like I'm playing Myst trying to figure them out.)

I was toying around with the idea of running some image display application fullscreen w/o borders or title and having KDE force each instance with a different wallpaper to run on a specific desktop. I may still work on that if Activities becomes a pain.

I think my initial foray into activities several years ago had me griping about the restrictions that had been placed on activities. I had wanted applications to be usable in different activites. Example: to use my favorite editor for editing code in one activity and use that same editor for writing documentation in another activity. I couldn't get the then-current implementation of Activities let me do that at the time.