Re: Nautilus vs gnome-shell and the future

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Fri, 2009-12-04 at 00:58 +0100, Giacomo Bordiga wrote:
> 2009/12/4 Зоран Рилак <zoran rilak gmail com>
>         For what it's worth, I need to interject here.  I know many
>         people
>         (myself included) who turn desktop icons off, not because I
>         keep many
>         windows open all the time (it's easy to access desktop as
>         Cosimo wrote),
>         but because I hate to look at the messy, unevenly shaped,
>         partially
>         overlapping icons, sometimes with large gaps between them.
>          More than,
>         say, 5 or 6 icons on the desktop simply demand my attention;
>         they
>         scream: "Drag us around!  Make us look neat!"  Then I have to
>         keep doing
>         that for every new couple of icons that land on the desktop.
> 
> This [1] is a mockup I made 1 year and half ago. I'm not sure if it
> can still be interesting/useful in the next gnome evolution. Still to
> me is a step forward to the current desktop icon management. 
> 
> In addition to Cosimo's points i think the desktop is also often used
> as a "buffer" for temporary file operation, works in progress or not
> yet categorized files.
> 
> [1] http://www.flickr.com/photos/7449355 N06/2329133852/

I don't think enforcing a layout like this on the desktop is a good
idea. I guess it might be nice to have some form of better arrangement
when you "Clean up by name", but having a fixed layout like that gives
you less space for your own files and forces the use of the desktop as
more of a place to launch other locations. The current main usecase for
the desktop is being a location where the user works on his current set
of active files, although that may change with gnome-shell as per this
discussion.


=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
       alexl redhat com            alexander larsson gmail com 
He's a lonely misogynist barbarian trapped in a world he never made. She's a 
virginal hypochondriac snake charmer who can talk to animals. They fight 
crime!