Re: [Usability]Why Desktop Icons?

["Nick Robbins" <drbadass bellsouth net>]

I disagree with this depending on the implementation.

The Windows 2000 way of doing this is to not show any icons, files,
or folders at all.  The 'desktop' folder still exists, and can be saved to,
but
won't be seen.  IIRC, you can drag icons to the desktop, and they vanish.

This is dumb.

The XP default is to have a blank desktop (save the recycle bin).  You *can*
save stuff there, but having the My Documents folder within the start menu
discourages that.  OTOH, I would assume that most Win programs
will put an icon there.  This is much better than the 2000 way, but still
not quite what you're asking for.

>GNOME, since the beginning, has icons on the desktop. It's almost a ripoff
>of Windows, which in turn was a ripoff of the Mac, which in turn was a
>ripoff of XEROX's original workstations in Palo Alto.

Must this be constantly restated?  It may be true, but it's pointless.

>My suggestion is that GNOME remove the icons from the desktop and >switch
all icons to the taskbar and menus. It distances them away from all >the
"knock-offs". It reduces clutter and creates a cleaner interface.
>It forces people to be a little more organized.

There's a fine line between being 'distant' and being 'foreign'.
I think that moving default icons off the desktop only works
if you make them just as accessable and plain in another location,
not buried within a menu (even 1 layer deep is too much, I think).
Cleaner, yes, but somewhat wasteful off the screen space.

It's a different matter when thinking of files and folders
on the desktop.  Personally, I use my desktop for transient
files that I know I won't be needing long, or projects I'm working
on right now, very much like...a desktop.

If you're proposing to make the desktop empty
as a rule and not as a default (as the last line seems to indicate)
then I wholeheartedly disagree.  Move the icons -- fine, but
keep your hands of my files.