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Comment by danpalmer | Hacker News Reader

From what I understand, and I don't follow this particularly closely, so I might be wrong...

They are removing the ability to have a Nautilus backed set of Desktop icons, with the intention of replacing this with something built in a more standard way for the rest of Gnome (which I think means web technologies?). As I understand it this not about removing desktop icons, it is about replacing unmaintained legacy code with more a modern alternative. I don't think the alternative is ready yet, but that's not to say that the direction they want to go is not having the feature.

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Yes, that's the logic behind GNOME's move, but it doesn't address the user's concerns. First of all they are removing code of a popular feature before it has been replaced. Secondly, they are adding to code duplication by creating 2 totally separate code bases.

In both OS X and Windows your desktop is just a folder with a background set to icon grid view. From right clicking to dragging, the UX is and should be identical to the file manager. So it makes sense to have that part of the UI handled by the program that's already a file browser.

Now a developer is going to recreate all of the features provided by Nautilus in a JavaScript and CSS extension. Any differences will make a janky experience for the end user.

Why should the desktop metaphor be constrained to “just a folder with a background set to grid view” though? Phones are already far ahead of most desktops by having widgets. Perhaps we’ll see innovation in the area of desktop UIs from Gnome when they get the next generation in place.

We tried widgets on the desktop: both macOS and Windows had them in previous versions, announced to great fanfare. Nobody used them and they were quietly removed.

Same thing with notification centers: another thing that both Mac and Windows added assuming it would be just as vital on the desktop as it was on phones. AFAICT they see very little use; I can't remember the last time I opened the notification center on either the Macs or PCs I use.

Not that new developments on the desktop aren't welcome, but widgets aren't it. Not every innovation that works on mobile can or should be brought to the desktop.

The usefulness of the notification center depends on the applications you run, I think. I recall putting a lot of work into 3rd party notification centers ages ago on PCs that didn't have a system one.

Certainly I use the PC one enough that I have the keyboard shortcut memorized and use it a bunch (Win+A). Interestingly, I find I often need it most in games, as the Windows version of the Xbox Guide, the Game Guide Bar, (even with the improvements in the recent April release), doesn't make it as easy to interact with things like Party Chat and Game Invite notifications as the Xbox Guide does on the Xbox One (where the Guide doubles as the Notification Center).

Widgets on the phone work great because the launcher is where I end up every time I press the power key. Widgets on the desktop are useless because the desktop is always obscured by things I'm actively working on, and the only time I will see a widget is when I'm not using my computer for anything at all.

Fair point. I don’t use a desktop at all because I use a tiling window manager.

When I worked at a Linux distro (endlessos.com) they had modified Gnome to have a universal search bar on the desktop. It was targeted at a different group of users than me, but it seemed to make sense based on that group.

Hopefully Gnome does sufficient user testing to deliver a useful experience to some significant group.

I would certainly use a search bar, especially if it had the capability to launch terminal programs or open a terminal in a certain directory. Most widgets I see on my phone are things like calendars or counters, which on a desktop OS should go in the same space as running programs.

Wouldn't that apply to desktop folder icons as well?

Was Microsoft ahead of its time with Active Desktop?

Yes...

And ActiveX was basically Electron!

In reverse! Oh, you want your desktop app on a website eh?

Note that Active Desktop and ActiveX were not really related beyond being MS-powered internet technologies.

You are not the first one to think so. It's been tried, in various forms, since the late 1980s, by Microsoft, by third-party companies writing software for Windows, by Apple, by virtually every major open source desktop, with precisely the same results: desktop widgets are fun gimmicks that people fiddle with for a day or two, then forget about them. No one uses them.

On macOS the desktop actually has slightly different behavior than a typical Finder window. Normally the desktop shows Hard disks, External disks, and Connected Servers; but if you open "~/Desktop" in a Finder window none of those items will be present.

Honestly, I never use the desktop for anything so getting rid of it isn't a big deal to me. Could you explain what kind of things you use it for? What's so bad about viewing the desktop through a window?

For me that's basically the "current place I'm working on". If I got a project, I'll have a dedicated directory. But a lot of stuff I are not a project, or will be done forever in a few hours.

So the desktop is a transition area, easily accessible, where I can put all the file I need for the task at hand right now. It's also the place I see everyday when logging it, so I can review what needs to be filed, and what need to be deleted. Clean desktop every morning, clean mind.

Yep, same here. It's kinda like my 'scratch space' - a quick place to drop downloads, screenshots, work on them a bit, and have them easily accessible from all workspaces.

As others have already commented, I don't trust them to add it back in.

And it would fit their design philosophy to permanently remove it, which has been moving away from the concept of files as a whole. Instead, you're supposed to launch the app that does what you're trying to do and then open the file that you want to edit through that.

Another feature removal that has shown this direction, is the removal of the option to create an empty file from the context menu in the file manager.

Again, instead open the app that creates the type of file that you want and then create the new file in there.

This is not the first feature that is removed before the replacement API is added, it is similar with the tray icons, tray icons are removed and only special GNOME apps can use a "tray like icon" for now until (and if) GNOME developers add a stable API so third party apps can use it.

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