KDE Plasma Remains Committed To Supporting Icons On The Desktop

[phoronix]

Phoronix: KDE Plasma Remains Committed To Supporting Icons On The Desktop

While GNOME upstream is removing support for desktop icons with that code having fallen into an unmaintained state over the years, KDE Plasma developers are reaffirming their commitment to supporting desktop icons...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=KDE-Will-Continue-With-Icons

[tildearrow]

Typo:

desktop icons will now be better supported aross multiple monitors

[schmidtbag]

That's good - I still use desktop icons. Not much, pretty much just anything I don't use often but still have an intention on using.

[jpg44]

Removing desktop icons is such an insane idea. The code to support that cannot be that great and should not take much to maintain, so thats a pretty lousy excuse. Its a very useful feature that allows easy access to common applications documents and folders. Gnome UI is such a cluster of screwups anyway, its basically unuseable. The workflow is simply terrible. Seems to be influenced by mobile touch interfaces. People need to realize that the mobile and desktop formats require completely different UI paradigms. Really anyone who has ever worked on mobile programming should be barred from touching desktop UIs.

[FireBurn]

They didn't remove them in Plasma 5, they just changed the default to have a folder view widget on the desktop with the option to have regular icons instead (which a few distros have as default anyway). In Plasma 5.11 the default changed to having regular icons, which they've committed to for 5.12 - their reasoning that more and more people are used to that on _mobile_ devices. Which goes against your argument completely.

[ebassi]

The main difference being that Plasma never used the file manager to render those icons — and Nautilus developers started writing a GNOME Shell extension instead of carrying around dead-by-default code that survived two major version cycles and that was blocking further improvements.

[M@GOid]

That to me this is one of the top two problems with the Gnome team. Have a piece of code that is unmaintained, remove it. To hell with the user needs. They did the same thing with the dual panels function on Nautilus, years ago. That simple function never came back. You can have that even on LXDE, but not Gnome.

[grok]

Am I the only one who didn't know Gnome 3 supports desktop icons?

[sebastianlacuesta]

I always have some application open that usually hides the entire screen, so in practice I find easier to use a menu or better a dock to open programs, and a file manager to deal with files. In fact, I don't use desktop icons since the late gnome 2.X days, since I realized that a good wallpaper is better than them.

[Charlie68]

Neither do I use the icons on the desktop, but when I work and I'm in a hurry I often save a document or file on the desktop, then I'll fix it in its place. This is to say that having the ability to work with the desktop is essential for those who use the PC for work.