Re: Configurable desktop items for sysadmins

[Federico Mena Quintero <federico ximian com>]

On Wed, 2009-09-16 at 10:15 +0200, Alexander Larsson wrote:

> First of all, the intended usecase of the desktop is to be a "work
> area", where you put stuff you are currently working on (much like an
> rea-life desktop). As such, any unnecessary icons we put there make
> this smaller and less useful to users.

For the record, let me state that I don't find the desktop very useful,
even as a staging area.  It's always hidden behind other windows!  But
anyway :)

> I fear that if we make it easy to get stuff on the users desktop, then
> applications (rather than sysadmins) will take advantage of this and put
> crap on the desktop, just like they do on windows.

One of the nice things about the way I implemented it is that
applications don't really know where the "sysadmin directory" is, at
least at installation time.  They'd have to read
the /apps/nautilus/desktop/predefined-items-dir key and write their crap
there.  It's not like they can just drop stuff in a well-known,
hard-coded location and have it appear in every user's desktop.

If apps try to do this at runtime, they won't be able to write to that
directory, as it's not owned by the user.

> In Gnome 3.0 we will move to gnome-shell rather than the current setup.
> The exact role of nautilus in this has not been finalized, but in talks
> I have had with the gnome-shell people it seems likely that we won't
> have the desktop as it currently stands, but rather some kind of file
> staging area that can be part of e.g. the sidebar and pulled out on
> demand, or something like that. So, if we add this now then it risks
> being obsolete soon anyway.

Yeah, we yet have to see what gnome-shell will bring in this area.
"Launching stuff" is one of its main functions, so I would expect it to
have something to let sysadmins create customized environments for their
installations.

I basically had only a couple of use cases for the sysadmin-defined
icons:

- The two or three apps that limited workstations use.  I've seen way
too many shops that have a custom point-of-sale system under Windows,
that crashes reasonably often, and the clerks have a hard time launching
again.  If they have a "POS app" icon in the desktop, that's pretty much
the only thing outside the POS system itself that they know how to use.
While it may be possible for sysadmins to configure .desktop files in
menu items, those are not toplevel items and users actually have to go
and hunt them down.

- Links to company-wide network shares; those are always in
impossible-to-remember paths.  Right now it's not possible to define
bookmarks for all users, I think.

Those would work pretty nicely as desktop icons in the current scheme of
things (my complaints about the desktop-hidden-behind-windows
notwithstanding).  I'm not thinking of this as general use cases, but
just for limited, restricted scenarios like point-of-sale systems,
clerks, etc.

  Federico