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. -- CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer Sun Microsystems Ireland mailto:calum.benson at sun.com Java Desktop System Team http://blogs.sun.com/calum +353 1 819 9771 Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems
