Re: Configurable desktop items for sysadmins

[Bogdan Butnaru <bogdanb gmail com>]

I prefer them on the desktop because they're bigger, and for most of
my users at least one of these is true: (1) they don't see very well,
or (2) the concept of “panel” is very unfamiliar.

Since the audience is very non-technical, metaphors need to conform to
real-life better: important things are big and separated. Accessing
all the important (for them) functions of a computer through a few
tiny icons near a corner is not intuitive. Choosing what they need
from a few big (scaled) icons on the desktop with descriptive names is
easier.

Having them undeletable (even fixed in position) I conjecture would be
useful because of the many cases I've encountered where users come to
me for help because they lost an app, or several. It was always just a
case of accidentally dragging them somewhere out of view, in a folder
or recycle bin. This is also a failure of the metaphor:
low-on-computer-skills users don't expect that big concepts as a
browser should be as easy to move and loose like a file, just as you
can't usually misplace your TV...

However, one of your earlier comments is relevant: gnome-shell will
probably be easier to adapt for this kind of users.

-- Bogdan Butnaru

On Thu, Sep 17, 2009 at 2:54 PM, Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com> wrote:
>
> Why do you need these on the desktop though, gnome generally puts
> launcher shortcuts on the panel. Also, do you need them to be
> undeletable?
>
> Also, can't you just put the link in /etc/skel ?
>
> On Thu, 2009-09-17 at 11:14 +0200, Bogdan Butnaru wrote:
>> On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 10:15 AM, Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com> wrote:
>> > 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?
>>
>> I've got exactly two use cases for which such a feature would have been useful:
>>
>> 1) My family (no familiarity with computers)
>> 2) Guest users (no familiarity with Ubuntu)
>>
>> In both cases, though for different reasons, their way of using the
>> computer is extremely different from mine. While all that
>> desktop-as-workspace concept applies well enough to me, it doesn't to
>> the cases above. Other people usually need to use my computer for
>> simple things: browse the web, check e-mail or chat a bit, and maybe
>> read or print a document. For anything more complex, they'd ask me to
>> do it, and I'd use my own account. Also, such users have no
>> familiarity with Ubuntu or Linux (e.g., position of menus), and
>> sometimes even with the concept of menu (e.g., my mom).
>>
>> For these situations I've often wanted a way to create a “default”
>> account with a handful of big, commonly-used icons (e.g., a link to
>> Firefox named just “Internet” in big, friendly letters). For my
>> parents I had to do it by hand, but it's annoying enough that I can't
>> do it for more people.