Calum - I hear you on the empty desktop, my vote would be in order of pref:
Computer and Documents Documents only JR Calum Benson wrote: > > On 28 Mar 2006, at 11:19, John Rice wrote: > >> I would love to see us drop the desktop icons as other distros are >> also doing. I gives a much cleaner desktop and users are free to add >> icons from any of their menu entries by just dragging and dropping >> them onto the desktop. > > > I did think about that, but I'm not sure a /completely/ empty desktop > is necessarily a good move. I agree that the fewer icons we have > there by default the better, but I think having even just one icon > there (as you get with first-time logins on both XP and MacOS, IIRC) > gives a good cue that it's an active space where more things might > appear or that you can add things to. A completely empty desktop can > look a bit intimidating if it's the first thing you see when you log > in, and it could be perceived as dead space or even broken by users > who are used to seeing icons there. > > Also, we don't really have an obvious way to add to the 'special' > icons (like Computer and Network) back onto the desktop, for users > who do want them... you can indeed drag them from the Launch menu as > you say (and there's also a gconf key to turn them on or off), but I > can guarantee that dragging things from a menu to the desktop isn't > something that will cross most users' minds :) > > If people think it's a good idea, though, I could be persuaded to cut > back the number of default icons further than the current proposal, > e.g. maybe just have Documents, or Documents and Network, or Computer > and Documents. It's your desktop guys, tell us what you want. > >> Are we planning to redo the icons and make them more conformant with >> the Linux Icon standardisation project? > > > Not as such, but we're getting a new theme from our branding guys for > our next productised release, which will include a complete new set > of icons (and they're aware of the Tango project). Although I don't > know if the plan is to include that theme in the OpenSolaris desktop, > or if we'll be reserving it for the Solaris version only. > > Cheeri, > Calum. >
