Re: Configurable desktop items for sysadmins

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Mon, 2009-10-05 at 19:53 -0500, Federico Mena Quintero wrote:
> 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.

Yes, this seems reasonable. But in such a setup maybe its not that hard
to just add the links in the skel user and make them undeletable (chmod
a-w)?

> - 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.

There is a lot of work outstanding on the bookmarks stuff (see
discussions between me and davidz on this) and how it should interact
nicely with mounted network shares. I think this is a better approach
than hardcoding something like this to just a desktop icon.