Why Plasma is the best thing since sliced bread

Today I was adjusting a bit the layouts of the Activities (as defined in Plasma) to better suit my workflows. To do so I was using the brand new Activity Bar which is present in KDE 4.2. It’s very neat, but takes up space on the desktop, and while it’s not a big deal on my main PC (1280×1024 resolution), it is an issue on my recently-resuscitated EeePC (1024×600).

It was then that it occured to me that such applets are, in Plasma-speak, PopupApplets, which means they adjust their behavior depending if they are in a panel or “free”. Also, I knew that Plasma had panel auto-hiding. 5 seconds later, I had a solution that fit my tastes, as this screenshot shows:

I could have used auto-hide also for the lower panel, but I’m not that comfortable, as I’m used to keep an eye to the systray, taskbar, and so on. In the end, I’m very satisfied with Plasma, since with a few adjustments I made it right for my workflow. This is an example of what it can do, and I can’t wait for context (as in semantic context) aware applications…