Hi William, hello.

> RSS reader, Social Media, Gemini protocol rendering, KDE Connect
> integration, etc. It is highly customized with lots of custom
> keybindings, making it unsuitable for coding or testing code.

Ah, interesting. That would indeed be something that could not be covered
by using activities. Cause the key bindings would still be global.

Exactly. But since I can log in with different accounts and desktops AT
THE SAME TIME it is just a CTRL-ALT-F3 (or whatever) to slide over from my
Plasma desktop to my OpenBox desktop. (Manjaro thing perhaps)

>    Openbox or Fluxbox is where I code and test most things.
> Uncomplicated, it does not interfere or get in my way or in the way of
> my IDEs or testing tools.

I see. I never got around to really testing something like Openbox. Maybe
coming from the Amiga I expect certain GUI stuff to work out of the box and
feared that I would need to much time to configure more minimal approaches
to do what I like.
I came a LONG way to get here, all the way from CP/M and VSPC.  GUI
desktops are just apps to me, so I play with them until I find the one I
like for my current purpose.    Plasma has become my main, because it
allows me to config everything as I like for daily use.  For coding I want
something that just gets out of my way.  Fluxbox was that for the LONGEST
time, but I am finding other simple desktops at least as good.  ( I miss
WINDOWMAKER though.)

There is some tiling window manager functionality implemented directly in
KWin meanwhile. But I am not even sure whether Openbox or Fluxbox is a
tiling window manager. Awesome is or has been and there were others as
well, but I have no idea what is up to date. And KWin certainly is not a
100% tiling window manager.

>    Wayfire, rather like Openbox for Wayland.  Fast, simple, complete,
> and fast.  (I know, I said that twice.  It gets me coming and going!)
> I use it for testing the same code for compatibility with wayland (or
> often properly with XWayland).

Yeah, while Plasma and KWin is not slow… I bet such a minimal setup would
still be faster. On newer laptops opening a Konsole window is instant, at
least when the app has been used before and still is cached. But I still
remember a slight delay for opening even just a Konsole window while on
AmigaOS it felt like the shell window was there before I even clicked the
icon.
I use YAKUAKE for most terminal work. And screen at the other end if that
work is remote so I can disconnect and then reconnect later.
I have browsers (Chromium, Firefox, Floorp, Tor Browser, Ladybird, Brave,
Falkon, Dillo) , Kristall for Gemini, Liferea for RSS, some Fediverse
clients, and all of the usual KDE tools.


I used to do a lot of shell work (BASH, KSH) [[Did you know you can write
client/server pairs in shell on modern Linux kernels? It seems weird, but
it works!]]. I used C, COBOL, Pascal, PERL 4/5, Assembler, BASIC, FORTRAN,
JES-2, JCL, HTML/CSS, SASS/SASS-GRAPH, and several database specific
languages. SQL is more general and works more places, but is NOT
performant!

These days just a bit of BASH, V-LANG, FreePascal, and whatever I run into
that seems interesting.

"Klytus, I'm bored. What plaything can you offer me today?" - Ming

--
William B. Peckham
Senior Network/Systems Administrator