Recently, I wrote a post about the KDE 4.5 SC release candidate. In that post, I was a little bit critical about the discoverability of desktop activities. I wasn’t too sure of what the purpose of these were, and there was nothing in the interface for creating these activities that gave the user any hint of what they were. This article provides an update on desktop activities.

Having thrown around a few initial impressions about the OLPC XOs, I thought I would take a more in-depth look at the user interface and some of the activities kids can engage in. And I have a couple of comments about their durability and adjustable screens.

GCompris is a excellent educational software suite for children aged 2 to 10. Most of the activities are game orientated educational. GCompris offers more than 100 activities in differentclassifications like classified into mathematics, puzzles, computer discovery, amusement activities,strategy games, experimental activities and reading activities. Gcompris is available in more than 40 Languages.

During the recent releases of KDE Plasma workspaces a new concept of Activities has been introduced and refined. This article does a great job of explaining what Activities are and how you can use them.

In this post I’ll instead write about my personal vision of how I hope activities will change my workflow. It’s based on my own experience and what I’ve read about activities. Note that it doesn’t necessarily coincide with the vision of the Plasma team...

Desktop Activities is a desktop usability concept that allows you to have multiple style and other settings for your desktop or desktops. There you have it, my attempt at a one sentence definition.

With virtual desktops you have many alternatives – you can use the Pager widget, desktop effects, keyboard shortcuts, switch desktop on screen edges etc. But what about activities? I counted the methods that I know and ended up with 7 different ways to switch activities (depending on how you count), all of which I’ll share in this post. Who knows, maybe you’ll find a new favorite?

"FSFE's activities have been varied over the last month. It's promising to see the increase of Fellowship activities across Europe. We are looking forward to seeing more local groups appear and to hearing about their activities on all levels. One of the most important parts of supporting Free Software is sharing knowledge in your own community.

The concept of activities is a new feature introduced with KDE 4. In the old desktop model of KDE 3, the desktop was a program called “kdesktop”, which gave users the ability to have a number of virtual desktops.