On Mon, 2009-10-05 at 19:53 -0500, Federico Mena Quintero wrote: > On Wed, 2009-09-16 at 10:15 +0200, Alexander Larsson wrote: > > > 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. > > For the record, let me state that I don't find the desktop very useful, > even as a staging area. It's always hidden behind other windows! But > anyway :) > > > 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. > > One of the nice things about the way I implemented it is that > applications don't really know where the "sysadmin directory" is, at > least at installation time. They'd have to read > the /apps/nautilus/desktop/predefined-items-dir key and write their crap > there. It's not like they can just drop stuff in a well-known, > hard-coded location and have it appear in every user's desktop. > > If apps try to do this at runtime, they won't be able to write to that > directory, as it's not owned by 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. > > Yeah, we yet have to see what gnome-shell will bring in this area. > "Launching stuff" is one of its main functions, so I would expect it to > have something to let sysadmins create customized environments for their > installations. > > I basically had only a couple of use cases for the sysadmin-defined > icons: > > - The two or three apps that limited workstations use. I've seen way > too many shops that have a custom point-of-sale system under Windows, > that crashes reasonably often, and the clerks have a hard time launching > again. If they have a "POS app" icon in the desktop, that's pretty much > the only thing outside the POS system itself that they know how to use. > While it may be possible for sysadmins to configure .desktop files in > menu items, those are not toplevel items and users actually have to go > and hunt them down.
Yes, this seems reasonable. But in such a setup maybe its not that hard to just add the links in the skel user and make them undeletable (chmod a-w)? > - Links to company-wide network shares; those are always in > impossible-to-remember paths. Right now it's not possible to define > bookmarks for all users, I think. There is a lot of work outstanding on the bookmarks stuff (see discussions between me and davidz on this) and how it should interact nicely with mounted network shares. I think this is a better approach than hardcoding something like this to just a desktop icon. -- nautilus-list mailing list nautilus-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/nautilus-list
