Re: Configurable desktop items for sysadmins

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Tue, 2009-09-08 at 16:22 -0500, Federico Mena Quintero wrote:
> [Re-sending from the correct address; sorry if you get a duplicate]
> 
> Hi, all,
> 
> A while ago, during the development of openSUSE 11.1, I wrote an
> extensive patch for Nautilus to let a system administrator set up
> desktop icons which would show up in users' desktops.

There are are a variety of interconnected reason why I don't like this.
Let me try to factor them out:

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.

It seems to me that in most cases what people want to do is put links or
application launchers on the desktop. (I guess since windows does this?)
This has two negative aspects wrt the mental model of how the gnome
desktop works. First of all it makes people think the desktop is made
for putting links at, which will cause them to not be able to use it
efficiently as a staging area for current files. Secondly, there is an
intended way that application launchers and file bookmarks are designed
to work in the gnome desktop, and putting stuff on the desktop is not
it. So, people may get confused as how these things are supposed to
work.

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. We all know what this
has lead to on windows, with microsoft being forced to add magic dialog
asking you if you want to remove unused desktop links, etc.

The desktop is a very important part of how the user interacts and works
with the computer. Having things there that are non-removable is very
user-unfriendly and will cause much irritation. I understand that there
are some special ("enterprise") cases where we want to lock down things,
and we should consider that, but generally we should try to be on the
side of 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.

That said, I know we got a lot of demands for this from some directions.
I think we need to go back to them and try to understand exactly what
they want to use this for, and why the current methods of e.g. bookmarks
and application launching is not good enough for them. Maybe they have
some interesting usecases that we could solve generically in a better
way?