Re: Global desktop directory?

[Adam Williams <awilliam whitemice org>]

>I can only speak for myself, but being active in nautilus ui
>development, I am trying to encourage nautilus developers to make $home
>as the desktop. Also I think in general, the correct way to add items to
>users accounts is through the applications vfolders, which affects all

I'm aware of vfolders in evolution but how does this apply to nautilus? 
I don't see vfolders mentioned anywhere in my nautilus side bar,
preferences, ...

>users applications menus and applications directories. I'm not sure what
>the official gnome stance is, but i like to think of the desktop as user
>space were the user should have total control. 

While I agree for 'power users', this simply doesn't work for the bulk
of corporate users,  who often struggle with the concept of 'double
click'.  Central control of menus, backgrounds, colors, and such is
absolutely imperative.  If someone needs the icon to get to a particular
folder, and they remove it from the desktop it is the fault of the
computer and the user interface.  They just don't care that they are the
ones who dropped it in the trash.

Corporate suits want uniformity, every one to have the same background,
etc...  There is no arguing with them, and they do have some valid
points.  With only ~200 users I've seen porno backgrounds &
screensavers, offensive language, racist images and comments, and all
such things that need to be kept out of the office environment.  The
simplest way is to make it so they can't change the background, etc... 
which is easy with M$ products and more or less impossible with GNOME.

>>Is it possible to define multiple desktop directories? We would like one
>>global directory and one in the user's homedir, so that we can apply
>>changes to the global directory and don't have to delete/add/change
>>..desktop files in all home-directories.

Better than a directory would be a modular system like PAM or NSS so
that menu properties, backgrounds, etc... could be pulled from something
like LDAP (or LDAP specifically in our case).  Having a file-system
based configuration just doesn't scale,  especially when you have many
workstations spread across various time zones.

>>Also, how do I edit the menu that new users find when they log on?

gmenu