On Aug 14, 2005, at 5:10 AM, R. A. Cantrell wrote:
Could one of the Cognoscenti, please, discourse upon the nature of the
desktop folder, its relationship to the Finder, any less imaginary
information than that which I currently possess that might lend an
actual
and reasonably detailed explanation of "really" why it is good
practice to
keep one's desktop clear of everything but icons and shortcuts, and
how all
of this might have changed in the move from the older OS's to X?
(2xwhew)
Sorry, but the Desktop is nothing more or less than another directory
in OS X. Finder knows to display its contents differently than it
does other directories, but that's about it. How full and cluttered
it gets and with what is entirely up to you and your ability to live
in a mess.
You can stuff tons of stuff onto your desktop and it neither harms
nor helps the system.
(As for me, my 'inner Oscar Madison' isn't so inner: I have multi-
hundred-megabyte folders on all my Mac Desktops called 'Big pile of
desktop crap'; these are folders into which I sweep all the stuff
that accumulates on my desktop until it gets so crowded I have to
clean up just to find things.
Stuff gets swept into that one folder and, well, someday I might
clean it out, but for now out of sight, out of mind...)
Any need to organize, slim, restrict to icons and shortcuts is simply
related to housekeeping and/or prior bad experiences with 4-year olds
who put things away in the trash when they're done playing with them.
(That cured ME of putting apps on the Desktop.)
There is no over-riding system need to keep the Desktop slimmed down.
That said: Applications placed in the Applications folder are where
the system expects them and all users of the system can use them
there. It's good practice to do that. Many folders in OS X are off
limits to users, though in 10.4 you can over-ride that. Drag
something to your Widgets folder in /Library/Widgets and the finder
will pop up a dialog saying you aren't allowed to put things there,
and has a button to authenticate as an admin so you can anyway.
OS X much more so than OS 9 has some pretty strict rules about some
folders, and this is more strict when you have multiple user accounts
on the computer.
Other users do NOT have access to your Desktop folder, for instance,
so anything in there is inaccessible if they're logged on (unless
they're admins and know the rudiments of Unix, which is why you need
to carefully consider who you give admin access to on your system)
--
Bruce Johnson
"No matter where you go, there you are", B. Banzai
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