Hi Steve, hi Alessandro, hi.

Steve Litt - 20.09.24, 03:47:35 CEST:
> I also use Openbox. I have a 6 pixel desktop click area along the left
> side of the screen so I can use mouse menus if I have to. No
> panel, nothing on the desktop surface, just the default black.

I have absolutely no panels shown on my main Plasma desktop by default.

They are all auto hiding behind several screen corners. Which means I have
all the available space for application windows. So there is no visible
GUI element of any kind on an empty desktop.

Except for some applets on the desktop of my communication activity which
has mail and messengers. It has an analog clock, a clickable weather
applet and an image I like. I do not have a clock shown by default on my
other activities. There is one in the auto hiding standard panel on the
left side screen corner.

On the top corner of both screens I have activity switcher panels for
activities like communication, system administration, researching
information and leisure activity like playing games or watching movies. As
well as ad-hoc or project related activities. I have an example for one
below.

On the left side of the notebook aka main screen I have the usual Plasma
panel, only slightly modified.

On the bottom side I have no panel but a composite effect showing all
windows for quick window switching.

I use this for my main private and freelance laptop as well as for my work
desktop.

I find activities is one of the most neglected or unknown features of
Plasma. It is at the same time one of the best features I have seen in any
desktop environments so far, once I understood how to use them. It helps
me a great deal to focus on things. It is like session manager within a
session manager. I can stop an activity and it automatically closes all
windows and apps in it. If I start it again it automatically opens
everything in it. With KDE apps this works up to the point that for
example the Kate editor opens with the exact same window layout and the
cursor positioned at exactly the right line of the file I last used. In KDE
apps even Recent files or KRunner searches can be adapted to show what I
use in an activity, but I never really looked into that. Not sure whether
this is on by default or needs to be activated.

When I wrote on the AmigaOS 3.2 book I used an activity for that. On
opening it has the Dolphin file manager open as before, a Konsole window
for git check-ins and pandoc invocations, as well as the Kate editor
exactly where I left it. Sometimes also some PDF files shown by Okular
opened at exactly the pages I had them open the last time I used the
activity. I do not even have a clue how much time this saved for me up to
now. But it feels like a lot of time.

And this all just got even better with Plasma 6 which I installed from
Debian experimental. I cannot recommend doing this right now until Qt
6.7.2 has migrated to Devuan Ceres. Unless you are willing to take the
extra hassle to make sure you use Qt from Devuan Ceres but Plasma packages
from Debian experimental. I hope soon enough this will all end up in
Debian Unstable and thus Devuan Ceres. But it is a lot of work for the
packages at least when you do it as thoroughly as being done for Debian
packages.

Best,
--
Martin