KDE 4.5 brings to the table plenty of useful, functional, innovative features. One of those very features is the Desktop Activity. The KDE Desktop Activities feature is a great new desktop metaphor that takes the Linux desktop to new levels of organization.

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.

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.

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?

Jack Wallen writes: "Not only is KDE 4.5 a far superior desktop to its predecessor, I would go as far to say that it has finally surpassed 3.5 in both usability and performance. That's a bold statement considering how the desktop has evolved."

Although the theory behind the idea was simple, the execution made the idea overly complex.The concept of Activities isn’t the easiest to understand until you actually start working with it. But once you get the hang of it, you will certainly appreciate what it brings to the desktop.

Now the plasma dashboard is a way to quick access your desktop widgets whente desktop is covered by windows, and i really like this feature as it works.

Desktop customization in Linux is very flexible; from the ultra-modern KDE and GNOME window managers to with the likes of Fluxbox and AfterStep, there's a Linux desktop to suit everyone. Jack Wallen covers some of your Linux desktop options.