# KDE Plasma Activities BoF at Akademy sparks community revival effort

> **Key takeaway:** The KDE community is revitalizing Plasma Activities with new user onboarding, preset configurations, and workflow improvements after discovering unexpectedly strong user interest at Akademy.

**Published:** 2026-10-31T23:00:00+00:00 
**Source:** Planet KDE (Desktop Engineers) 
**Category:** distro-planet 
**Canonical URL:** https://fosswire.org/news/kde-plasma-activities-bof-at-akademy-sparks-community-reviva.html 

## Summary
A Birds of a Feather session on KDE Plasma Activities at Akademy drew approximately 30 participants and revealed substantial latent community interest in the feature, with related lightning talk recordings exceeding 1,200 views. Activities, which provide context-separated desktop environments distinct from virtual desktops, are now the focus of a coordinated development push to improve discoverability and usability for new and existing users.

The initiative proposes shipping Plasma with preset Activities such as Presentation and Gaming to demonstrate the feature's capabilities, addressing the current problem where many users default to a single catch-all Activity that undermines context separation. Contributors are being recruited through the #kactivities:kde.org Matrix channel to implement these changes and explore a new Workflow concept that could fundamentally improve how users transition between task contexts.

## What changes for Plasma Activities
- **Preset Activities:** Plasma may ship with predefined Activity templates including Main/default, Presentation, and Gaming, each with tailored plasmoids, associated applications, and power settings.
- **Presentation Activity:** A dedicated preset would disable automatic suspend and screen blanking, and isolate browser history to prevent accidental oversharing during demos and talks.
- **Per-Activity history isolation:** KickOff search and usage history are already restricted per Activity, keeping gaming or personal browsing results out of work contexts.
- **Default Activity reframing:** The community is reconsidering the main/default Activity not as a failure state but as a hallway or starting point for context switching, with active exploration of a Workflow concept to improve transitions.
- **Entry point for contributors:** Development coordination is centralized in the #kactivities:kde.org Matrix room, with the BoF identifying implementable improvements as low-hanging fruit.

## Why it matters
For Linux desktop users and distribution maintainers shipping KDE Plasma, this represents a meaningful usability investment in a long-underutilized differentiator against GNOME and other environments. If preset Activities and improved onboarding land in a future Plasma release, distributions could reduce user support burden by providing context-aware desktop defaults that compete with commercial workspace management tools.