KDE always starts with "New Activity"

[rolf]

I did the upgrade with urpmi from R3 64-bit as I have too many custom configurations and binary installations in system files to want to go through that. In the end, with some profanity-laced hammering on the system, it seems to be working well.

KDE Activities are, as yet, useless to me. I never use them except to undo the unwanted trouble they have caused me, usually, upon a new installation. I have nine desktops arranged in the Desktop Grid/Expo applet, which is great , and can't imagine needing anything more. I can't imagine that usage of Activities is so wide-spread but I can't do anything about it.

This time, after some thousands of 2014.1 packages were downloaded and installed, I had quite a struggle with my default Desktop activity getting placed on my secondary, only occasionally used, plasma screen. The Activity on my desktop machine LED/LCD monitor was empty of my custom configurations.

1. I have a Radeon card and use fglrx
2. The plasma screen is usually not being used and only is needed when I want to display some multimedia in full-screen.
3. I do have / on an SSD, which seems to be a bit of a common factor in one KDE bug report I found: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=321781

As it is, on a fairly new system with rocky beginnings, plasma desktop comes up as "New Activity". It happens to have my custom desktop settings but "New Activity" is ten times more ugly than the cashew, which spawned the IHateTheCashew applet. If I click on "New Activity", there is one other Activity, Desktop, and I get my Desktop with minimal cashew if I select that. There doesn't seem to be any way to prefer this Activity in the Activity chooser. Mostly, I wish there were some way to remove Activities, as this causes me nothing but trouble.

Thanks.