On Mon, 2021-09-27 at 18:22 -0400, Jonathan Billings wrote:
It sounds like a tablet/phone interface, but those don’t have a
traditional “desktop”.
There are some serious flaws with that setup. What happens if a
user’s home is full/out of space? What if it is a network drive?
What if you have 10,000 users? What if each of them have network
drives? What if they have encrypted drives that aren’t accessible to
root? What if they don’t have a Desktop directory and their home
directory has the maximum directory size? I could keep going.
How does the user find the three apps they need amongst a hundred other
that they don't use, nor have no clue what they are (often the names
mean nothing related to purpose), and aren't even in the same position
in the stack from week to week?
My phone wanted to be like that, but I only have the apps I keep on
using every day on the home screen. The rest would have been shoveled
into several extra screens of unsorted nonsense (in installation
order), or alphabetically sorted nonsense (if I let it re-arrange
them). Instead, I categorise them into folders of apps for related
functions.
Next on the list of mobile phone high irritations is being completely
unable to install some pre-installed apps they insist must be on your
device. The manufacturer's ones rarely get debugged. If enough
complaints roll in about bugs, they often just delete the app instead
of fix it.
In general you never want packages to touch a user’s home. It should
be up to the program to set up any user configuration, and if that
includes adding a launcher *after the user has launched it* then so
be it.
There already exists a mechanism for all DEs to get a list of
applications available to the user, through the directory of .desktop
files. It’s up to the DE to define how to show it.
I agree completely. On Mate, it's like the very old Gnome, clear
desktop beyond just three icons: computer, home, and trash. There's
categorised menus, and if you want to make a desktop or taskbar
launcher for any of them, you can just drag and drop them out of the
menu to where you want. Very simple.
Stuff piled on the desktop is under the windows of apps that you're
using. Not very useful for multitasking.
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