KDE Plasma Remains Committed To Supporting Icons On The Desktop

[JPFSanders]

I'm that weird guy who understands and likes Gnome's workflow. To me they are making all the right moves. Gnome needs more users that use it the way it was intended instead of using 15 extensions to turn it into a another XFCE. In a sense it's a good thing that people who don't like Gnome use another DEs - that's why they exist in the first place!

You explained the problem to yourself using your own logic. :-)

[MoonMoon]

And I'm waiting for both of you in the i3 camp.

Fun fact: you can be in the KDE camp and the i3 camp at the same time. I am quite enyoing running Plasma with i3 replacing Kwin, having the best of both worlds.

[IreMinMon]

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.

Maybe there's gonna be an extension for desktop icons

[andrebrait]

Even though Linux is all about choice and all, I can't help but think this "having 3000 desktop environments" is bad for the system as a whole. Lots of effort, lots of competition for what could just be one very configurable desktop and that's it. At most, we would need a high end and a low end one and that's it.

I know, I know.... But that's how I feel, anyway.

[Delgarde]

The code to support that cannot be that great and should not take much to maintain

You're clearly not a developer, are you?

[brrrrttttt]

GNOME-as-it-is is a brick. I wish it was a solid, real-life brick, so I could hit a few heads in the GNOME dev team, but I can't even do that. It's completely useless.

Although it is highly likely that the whole team got a few hits in their head already. There's just too much hubris behind a niche DE running on a niche OS.

I've been using it on my primary machine for months with no extensions and zero issues. It's actually quite pleasant having something nice and simple with no rubbish I don't want (e.g. desktop icons).

[ssokolow]

I'm that weird guy who understands and likes Gnome's workflow. To me they are making all the right moves. Gnome needs more users that use it the way it was intended instead of using 15 extensions to turn it into a another XFCE. In a sense it's a good thing that people who don't like Gnome use another DEs - that's why they exist in the first place!

I'd be more sympathetic to your viewpoint if GNOME weren't making such a mess of desktops other than KDE by foisting more and more of their HIG decisions onto any user of GTK+.

There's a reason why I'll be upgrading from LXDE to either LXQt or KDE when I move off Lubuntu 14.04 LTS and I'm planning to run all GTK+ applications in Flatpak, even if only in unconstrained mode. (So the QT/GTK+-level portal patches can supply Qt-based file-chooser dialogs such as the KDE ones when applications ask for GTK+ ones.)

[angrypie]

Gnome needs more users that use it the way it was intended instead of using 15 extensions to turn it into a another XFCE.

GNOME-as-it-is is a brick. I wish it was a solid, real-life brick, so I could hit a few heads in the GNOME dev team, but I can't even do that. It's completely useless.

Although it is highly likely that the whole team got a few hits in their head already. There's just too much hubris behind a niche DE running on a niche OS.

[aufkrawall]

The desktop in KDE is super powerful if you need it (and uses little memory apparently, even though it's slower to start but will improve in 5.12).

I've always found KDE's Startup Performance quite pleasing, at least since when I first tried it with 5.7 or so. 5.12 will surely get some optimizations, but I don't think it would be fitting to rate it as "slower" until then.
And unlike Windows, the system is fully ready to use directly after logging in.

[LaeMing]

I use KDE, but eschew desktop icons, preferring to lock my regulars in the task manager where they won't get covered by windows. And I use the root of my home hierarchy to dump uncategorised working files. But that is just me. Having the option for those who prefer to use the desktop as their launcher is always good.

(Though, like a lot of things MacOS-UI-ish, the desktop-as-launcher concept made a lot more sense back in the pre-MultiFinder days of the mid-80's to mid-90's when the desktop was somewhere you always returned to between applications).