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Comment by alex-moon | Hacker News Reader

To be fair to the author, I actually think desktop icons is a problem that no desktop manager has ever solved, and I think the reason is because it's not solvable in a user friendly way. The problem is that desktop icon arrangement can mean different things to different users: some people are just arranging their icons in a one dimensional list that's wrapped, while others are arranging theirs in clusters (top left is for system, top right is for documents, bottom left is for personal/games etc), while yet others are arranging theirs in columns and so on - how these are supposed to change on resolution change is different per each use case. When I switched to dwm on desktop I felt freed from a problem I had literally just always had.

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If you let the user arrange their icons in the preferred shape, for each screen resolution they use, and save that, the problem is solved. As the article describes.

The bug described in the article was the icons being moved around without user input, and then their wrong/unwanted location saved as "user preferred icon arrangement". Which sounds like an obvious bug in hindsight.

> If you let the user arrange their icons in the preferred shape, for each screen resolution they use, and save that, the problem is solved.

Users normally place their icons using a given, single resolution, so that would only give you one initial saved icon position. You need some heuristic when the user first changes resolution with that icon present on the desktop.

Yes, and any heuristic is fine, because it's a once-in-a-lifetime* rearrangement. In other words, this situation is not part of the problem.

*lifetime of that computer

My screen realestate changes several times a day. My work daily driver is a laptop that has a built in screen of a particular resolution. In the office it plugs into a dock with one monitor that has a different resolution than the built-in display. When I take it home and plug it into a dock it has two external monitors of different resolutions.

Icons need arrangements in each combination of monitors, resolutions, and scaling. So that when I'm sitting at my desk in the office I have a consistent experience of icon location. When I'm at home and have different screen layout, I can have a different icon layout suited to that screen layout and everytime I plug the dock in at home I should get the same arrangement that I had yesterday. If there's a new icon that has never been placed in a particular desk setup, drop it anywhere.

> My screen realestate changes several times a day.

Does it change often enough that an absurd like 20s update-time would impact you?

Anyway, the article has plenty of reasons to save more than 1 resolution as "user-defined positions". But not a lot of them, probably 2*n^2 for n monitors is more than enough.

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