Hello Engagement team, I am writing an article for Fedora Magazine titled "What's New in Fedora 28 Workstation?" Among the new features, I wanted to use this as a platform to communicate to the Fedora users about the Nautilus desktop changes in 3.28. The Fedora Magazine is a very popular site for Fedora users and it is an excellent conduit for distributing news about the project. Here is my current draft of the section about Nautilus. Please let me know if we (as the GNOME engagement team) like the way this is messaged, of if we want to change it:
New features isn't always about addition; sometimes, a new feature means removing something. For years (since GNOME 3.0 was released), Files has been carrying some technical debt. In GNOME 3.28, the development team finally removed a long-unmaintained section of Files. In contrast to other commercial desktop operating systems and even other Linux desktop platforms, GNOME does not present icons on the desktop. This was a deliberate design decision, and continues to be the normal desktop behavior. However, Files continued to include the option to put icons on the desktop, should the user choose to enable the option. Over the years, the development team tried to preserve and isolate the desktop icon code from the rest of Files. While they achieved some level of isolation, ultimately the changes introduced more problems than they intended to solve. Now the desktop icon code is actively blocking future development and feature enhancements. So in GNOME 3.28, this option (along with all the code that enabled it) has been removed. A lengthy technical discussion about the merits and reasoning behind this decision is available on the GNOME team's development website. Many Fedora users should not be affected by this; the default behavior shipped in "upstream" GNOME (to not put icons on the desktop) is mirrored in Fedora's implementation of GNOME. Advanced users who have previously enabled desktop icons will find that Files no longer presents icons on the desktop. Those files can still be accessed via the Desktop folder inside Home. For those users who do still want desktop icons, there are two solutions. The immediate solution is to use a different file browser, such as nemo. See Alternative Solution on the GNOME development website for instructions on how to install nemo and launch it on login. The long-term solution proposed by the developers is to create a GNOME Shell extension that puts icons on the desktop. While a prototype is available, it is not ready for daily use.
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