The GNOME Desktop Environment is my favorite desktop environment on Linux because it has proven to be the most extensible and developer friendly. Take, for example, a common feature like the GNOME Activities overview.
I know many KDE Plasma users who have been waiting for an update that will make available such a feature but so far it has been a no-show.
Anyway, thanks to a fresh project on GitHub, KDE Plasma users can now have an activities overview of their system sort of like can be done in GNOME – the project is called qOverview.
qOverview is a dashboard developed to be a clone of the famous GNOME Activities feature in the GNOME shell. It is written in QML and Python backend and can run on virtually all desktop environments, especially KDE Plasma.
This desktop extension has all the features present in GNOME activities except for the drag-and-drop windows to workspaces which I am quite certain will be available soon if the project goes according to plan.
The developer, Bharadwaj Raju, explained on Reddit that it was apparent a good number of people miss GNOME’s Activities overview in Plasma and so he thought it wise for him to make a replacement.
qOverview has a bunch of programs which must be installed before being installed on your PC and you can find a complete list on its GitHub page. The most important thing to take from there is that it does not run on Wayland sessions.
If you’re not sure of which session type you are running you can check out the nifty extension in our article here.
With regards to its Windows layout, qOverview is perfect yet as you can see from the screenshot above, but since the lack of an Activities menu overview is a major reason why people shy away from trying out other desktop environments, I figured you might want to have a go at it.
How to Install qOverivew in Linux
Check to see that you have the required dependencies and follow the installation steps given it the GitHub page.
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What do you think about KDE Plasma not having an activities overview? And what is your favoirte desktop environment? Let us know in the comments section below.
