Pin windows to specific activities in plasma

I have recently upgraded from Fedora 32 to Fedora 34 via dnf system-upgrade. There were a few minor hickups during upgrade, but all seems to have worked out. However post-upgrade I’m noticing changes in behaviour that seem not right.

One of those is that on logging in in my kde plasma session, the relation between my windows and plasma activities are no longer retained. That is I have 3 activities and used to have a specific set of windows open on each of them. Prior to the upgrade the windows would be restored to the proper activities on reboot. On Fedora 34 this is no longer the case. All windows open on the first activity each time I reboot. I can manually move them to the other activities and it will remain like that until my next reboot. This is cumbersome to do each time.

How can I fix this ?

I have searched for settings that could affect this but I don’t see any. Kde is configured to save sessions across reboots. I couldn’t fine any other related setting, nor did a search on the internet suggest anything obvious.

1 Like

There were a lot of changes between 32 & 34. I don’t use kde (you only mention that in passing so I suspect you are using that but it is not stated) so cannot even guess which apps you are talking about. More detailed info would help us all immensely.

  1. Have you done a full system update since the upgrade?

+1 for using DNF System-Upgrade. Most people don’t use it and then some of them experience problems.

What is your setting for When logging in under Workspace->Startup & Shutdown->Desktop Session

That is set to “Restore previously saved session” (freely translated from
Dutch “Vorige opgeslagen sessie herstellen”).

You might try changing it to “Start with an empty session”. Then reboot, setup your windows again and then change the setting back to what it was. See if they start sticking after that.

Alternatively, you could create window rules for those applications that force them into the activities you want them in.

I had tried the window rules path before but didn’t get very far. I have about 10 konsole windows open, spread across the three activities. I didn’t find a way to pin one console window to activity A and another to activity B. These rules seem to be on the application level, not the window level.

When I have some time I’ll try to reset the saved session as you suggest and recreate one. It will take some set up effort, but perhaps that may fix it.

Where is the session state saved ? I would like to make a copy of it before I reset it to try and find whether a particular bit of saved state is causing this.

I have reset the setting to “Start with empty session”, rebooted and reconfigured a few Konsole windows to open on different activities. I also then changed the setting back to what it was. Unfortunately on the next reboot the activity affinities were forgotten again: all Konsole windows open on the first activity.