 One of the things that has happened during this whole six-month Linux challenge thing is that I moved from Xfce to Katie now The overall experience has been very good Which is kind of surprising given the fact that Katie has notoriously hated my living guts like it has been so buggy for me over the course of the last two years and Maybe and probably it's all user error. I don't know but this experience on Redcore has been Actually really really stable from a Katie's perspective. I've had other problems with Redcore But that has nothing to do with plasma. So we'll talk about that in another video But the point is is that Katie has been Fantastic for the course of the last five days and I've had a really good time with it It kind of reminds me of why I liked plasma so much to begin with so one of the features that I actually Have never used before but I kind of knew it existed was Activities now not many people actually know that activities exist unless you've lived in Katie for a long time and Chances are the reason why you know activities exist is probably because you stumble upon them. They're not really well Marketed by the Katie team unfortunately and they are awesome. So today. We're gonna talk about Katie Activities and why I think that they're so awesome. So let's go ahead and take a look at Katie first So this is my Katie desktop and yes, things aren't matching right now It's just because I had to reinstall Redcore, but we'll talk about that again in another video but basically what activities allow you to do is Organize your desktop environment in a way where your tasks are separated by activities So you can have an activity safe for your work You can have activity for just general browsing or whatever you can have an activity for creating videos like I do Basically what it does is it allows you to recreate your entire desktop environment Several different times and then use those different activities just when you're going to do that activities So why is this good? Well? Supposedly it allows you to have focus on just the activity that's supposed to be there and not anything else Now obviously this does require some discipline because you can still open up Firefox and go to YouTube in your work activity It can happen But the idea here is that you create activities to be more focused on the activity that you're supposed to be focused on instead of You know just having one desktop where everything is kind of shoved together So the reason why I like this so much is because of two reasons one I'm a big tabs guy so if you've ever watched my channel before you know that I really like to have tabs and basically everything and While this isn't quite tabs it does basically allow me to have separate things or separate desktops in different places and it just really Makes me happy. I can't really explain it beyond that But it allows me to organize my stuff in such a way that is just really groovy with my workflow It just works really really well now I Usually have four or five different activities and it just allows me to put all my work stuff in one place My video stuff in one place and then I have a main one that where I'll like I do all my regular browsing and stuff So it just allows me to be more organized plus the other reason why I really like it is that you get more Workspaces every time you create an activity. So they're really the same workspace, but because they're on a new activity They're blanks. So in the case of my activities here I have three workspaces on videos I have three workspaces on default and it just allows me to put stuff wherever I want now You guys know that I love workspaces and this just gives me more workspaces without having to actually create a ton of workspaces So it's just really really nice the main benefit of this is just Organization and if you are a super organized person, I try to be don't always succeed But basically this just allows you to organize your workflow in such a way where things are compartmentalized And in theory that will allow you to focus better now in terms of actually creating a Activity you can click this button here and then you can actually name the activity so we're going to call this one work and this is the place that oops that I work and So you give a name in a description you can give it an icon if you want to so you can customize it So it looks a little bit different and you can have it not track your activity Some people are going to see this and say like oh my god Plasma is tracking me kind of but really all that's just local If you've ever used an iPhone or Android phone You'll know that both of those devices track your usage so that you can kind of Determine what apps you've been using the most Plasma apparently does that too and then you can also Select a shortcut or a key binding for this particular activity So I've been using the alt key and this one is going to be alt alt w And then I can just hit create and then if I do alt w it'll change me to that particular activity And then I can go back to the activity that I was on and so on and so forth So you can also tab between activities with super key and tab Just like so and I have it set up so that I can actually show the tab switcher or the activity switcher With soup with super Z and then you can use your mouse if wanted to or get to the activity settings If you wanted to do that in the activity settings, you can change between how you cycle through different activities You can also create activities from here as well So there's another cool thing about this that I wanted to mention just you know quickly here You can pin tabs if you use the icons only task manager You can select it so that you can pin tabs just to the activity So for example, this is my activity for creating videos I have audacity Kaden live and OBS all pinned but they are just pinned on this particular activity So if I were to switch to another activity So the one that we just created was alt w you should be able to see that those icons there are no longer available So that means that you can have it so that your Activities are really truly focused. So if you wanted to make sure that you've never got access to your browser while you're working Let's just say you want to do that You could ensure that your Firefox or whatever is not pinned on your taskbar at all in that activity It just makes it a little bit harder for you to get to it doesn't mean you can't do it Obviously, it just means that it provides some resistance to Opening up Firefox going into YouTube watching cat videos, you know It gives you that a little bit of resistance One thing that I want to say that I wish that it had was that One of my favorite features of plasma is the do not disturb mode and a lot of desktop environments have this Basically what it does is it shuts off all of your notifications for however long And what I would really like to happen and maybe the this feature exists and I just can't find it But what I would like to have happen is that I could set do not disturb When I'm in an activity. So if I'm in my work activity, I'd love to have do not disturb on all the time Same thing with my video record activity if I could turn on do not disturb here But have it on on my main have notification stuff on when I'm on my main activity That'd be awesome as far as I know that doesn't exist yet But I hope in plasma 6 that feature comes because that would be really cool So those are plasma activities and they are just fantastic for organization If you like separating all of your stuff out into the proper place Like I do activities allow you to do that in a way that even Workspaces don't because workspaces are things that just exist, right? You can't At least I mean you can name them But no one really pays attention to the names and you just move between them and things just kind of get cluttered over time Whereas with activities you can be as organized as you want You can try to make sure that every activity is as focused as you want on whatever task you're trying to set yourself within that activity And it just means that you can be more organized with your workflow Which will hopefully make you more efficient when you're doing actual work And will you can avoid actually going to see those cat videos on youtube? So that's it for this video. If you have thoughts on activities, you can leave those in the comment section below You can follow me on master down or odyssey those links to be in the video description You can support me on patreon at patreon.com slash the linux cast links for libera pay and youtube will be in the video description Thanks to everybody who does support me on patreon youtube you guys are all absolutely amazing without you the channels If not be anywhere near where it is right now. So thank you so very very much for your support I truly do appreciate it. You guys are all awesome. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time