File isolation on activities

Goals

• Enable some activities to have specific home folder isolation
• Enable specific apps to have home folder isolation
• Enable activities to opt in or opt out of home folder isolation
• Sharing of desktop settings like themes, icons, cursors, etc
• Sharing of specific applications configuration files
• Have defined default apps per activities (isolated or not) to be easily ran
• Track running of default apps, so to not start already running
• Ability to reach real home folder in case of isolated
• Have a default initial stage of home folder (start with files that will not be synched if changed)

Using bwrap to allow file isolation

• Using bwrap to isolate an app to a home beloging to the activity
• Bwrap allows to bind some files/folders.
  • Using that functionality to have common themes/fonts/cursor settings
  • Having default settings for all dolphin/konsole/etc even though isolated
• Using systemd-run to launch default apps
  • Apps which autostart at activity starting
  • Apps that should always be running
    • So in my case, if I have 3 apps as default in the activity and I close 2, pressing Meta+1 will launch the 2 I had closed

Folders/files documentation

• apps

  • Folders/files to bind overlay for specific apps. mainly settings I want shared through activities

• bin

  • Main activities scripts, being the activities.workspace the big one.
  • activities.id and activities.name are easy way to know which is the current activity
  • activities.run_default runs the default apps for the activity
  • activities.create_firefox creates a firefox profile for the activity
  • All the other files are symlinks to activities.workspace, in order for the script to be run instead of the original

• env

  • Setting for plasma to have the path of bin before the real binary/app. way to make the activities.workspace be ran.

• activities.sync.glocal

  • Basic files/folders to bind overlay in order to have proper theme/gtk theme/mouse cursor/fonts between isolated activities.

• windowmanagement.kwinscript

  • Custom kwin script to manage rules for apps in a per activity case.
  • Also does some custom stacking tiling, for my usecase. (not general case use, very custom to my liking only)

Instalation

• Copy/Git clone files into ~/.config/plasma-workspace

• Log out and login again, so that plasma picks up the PATH change on ~/.config/plasma-workspace/env/10-localbin.sh

• Adapt to your needs, I am not really doing anything special or magic

• More info: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Bubblewrap and https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Bubblewrap/Examples