the things I wanted to do required a non-standard dock (latte?), but made activities so much nicer.

my dock only had icons on it that reflected the current activity, my backgrounds were different, all the tools for the specific activity that I was doing were immediately available, but weren’t cluttering up the dock when I switched to other activities.

activities really are sweet, I’m sad to hear KDE is backpedaling on them.

That said, I’ve been using Gnome because the blended workflow of interacting with desktops, searching for applications, and working with open applications in the overview is just as sweet as it comes.