Using KDE Plasma Activities with Qubes OS

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Hello !

I’ve been using KDE Plasma for years across several Linux distros and the “Activity” features always felt underwhelming as it felt too similar with Virtual Desktop without bringing anything really special.

I moved to QubesOS as my daily driver for the “reasonable” security and how easy it makes compartmentalizing your digital life, and it’s incredible and I have yet barely scratched the surface of the possibility with this system.

When I installed KDE Plasma in QubesOS I thought that I was missing an opportunity to merge Plasma Activities’ with QubesOS compartmentalization, so I created a small daemon which synchronize your Activities with your Qubes. QubesUser 95639 / KActivityQubesd · GitLab

It’s far from perfect and there’s a lot missing from what is still possible, but it works, and in my eyes it’s a bit better than good enough.

I hope this project will inspire you and allow you to refine your workflow. :smiley:

I’d love having this community feedback on this, I probably missed lots of better way to achieve this goal, and contribution are welcome.

Have fun ! :slight_smile:

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For what’s it’s worth, I made a quick code review before OP made this public, it’s really minimalistic with ~200 lines of code and it does the job advertised, nothing more.

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I’m sorry, but I can’t understand what this is supposed to actually do.

Make sure each qube has its own desktop or activity?

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Yes, I think the benefits of doing this has been discussed in the KDE Plasma topic

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Activity and Virtual Desktop (which are very similar but actually two different features in KDE Plasma) help organize your apps and can be an important part of your workflow.

The idea behind this small project is to automate the creation and management of Activities when using QubesOS and the windows rules needed to only display them in the right Activity.

So you’ll have one activity for each Qubes (I’d like to have a bit more control on that, DispVM tend to be used alongside some other Qube and don’t really benefit from being in their own Activities), but you could still have several Virtual Desktop if you tend to use multiple software in an AppVM (terminal/files explorer/web browser/etc).

I’ll agree that this is not for everyone, and this project is born from my need of it for my particular workflow. But if you’re interested or have questions about the code I’ll be glad to answer ! :smiley:

I think that I should add some screenshot to illustrate the usage better.

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