| Matthew Rosewarne on 18 Oct 2008 00:53:15 -0700 |
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On Thursday 16 October 2008, Eric wrote: > Somebody decided that leaving icons on the desktop is sort-of a > "Windows" thing to do... so they flat-out prohibited it. > You CAN put an icon on the desktop without using a Widgets > but, trust me, you don't want to do that. It's an indirect > process - worse than useless for regular use. It is hardly "prohibited". Rather, the desktop just operates differently from previous KDE versions. More below. > The familiar things are fairly well hidden. For example, if > you don't like the new menu structure then you just remove the > Application launcher widget and drop in the "Traditional" > Application launcher. Thanks.... now I'm a "traditionalist" :-) Since many don't particularly like the new menu, as I didn't at first, the original menu can be restored simply by right-clicking on the icon and choosing "Switch to Classic Menu Style". Though since I have given it a try, I find the favourites and search bar make it actually quite nice. Still, there are better things coming. . > When I complained that I (occasionally, honest!) like to drop icons on the > desk while working on a project I was told to use a widget called "Folder > View". Folder view allows you to see the contents of a folder in a > sort-of-shaded window on the desktop. Unfortunately, it behaves kind of > like a permanently open window on your desktop. Worse, you have to add the > widget and then configure it so don't expect it to be something you'd do > routinely as part of a work-oriented task. How this is better than leaving > icons on one's desktop I'll never know Why not just leave the folder view on your desktop? I have it (among other things) displaying my home, so it's easy to get to my files. Just have a big folder view lying around pointing to some folder where you can drop your icons. I don't see how this can cause so much turmoil. > My impression is that some really smart (but not exactly customer focused) > developers got a "rod" for desktop icons and managed to hijack the rest of > the KDE team to go along with it. If they did not want desktop icons then > they don't have to use them but to effectively prohibit them is, in my > opinion, ignorant elitism. Nobody expected anyone would be so militant about desktop icons. Nobody hijacked anything, and I would rather not talk about Aaron Seigo's "rod". While the folder view works very well, the developers have heard the concerns and 4.2 will have a mode where folder view will be the entire desktop, effectively replicating the old "icon dumping ground" desktop. So please save the inflammatory rhetoric for cable news. > Bottom line? I say install it (as well as 3.5) and try it out. There are, > as I note, many things to like. I'm looking forward to 4.2 and beyond. > You may also discover (as I have) that Gnome (which I abandoned years ago) > is not as bad as it once was. And at least they don't tell you the "right" > way to do your work :-) Actually, GNOME has been famous for requiring the user have the "right" behaviour since at least Gnome 2. They created a HIG without input from usability engineers and enforced it rigidly, burying any lost functionality in gconf. If there's something that KDE 4 doesn't do for you, chances are it's a technical limitation, not an arbitrary policy. Attachment:
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