icons on desktop with xfce

[Olivier Fourdan]

Hi

On Sat, 2004-05-01 at 19:14, purslow at sympatico.ca wrote:
> up on Olympus, OF has been remaining silent, perhaps acquiescing,
> but desktop icons do seem contrary to his original conception of XFCE.
> would he be willing to tell us his present thoughts re the subject ?

Mostly because I already expressed my thougths on this. 

Technically, I think "icons on the desktop" should be part of a more
general file manager. A file manager that would use icons (spatial or
not, I don't care much), and that would give an alternative to xffm (it
would not replace xffm, it would just provide a "classical" icon view
when it's needed). Ideally, it should be part of xffm, that would save a
lot of duplicate work (do we really need/want/can afford to write and
maintain 2 file managers in xfce?).

On the usage of icons on the root win, people put either their favorites
apps or documents on to the desktop like on a "pinboard" just to keep
things "on the same place". Xffm already provides this feature, with its
"bookmarks", and I think it's easier to spawn xffm (or even better, keep
a copy running) and use xffm bookmarks than using the root window which
is, by definition, generally covered by windows (and yes, I know about
the "show desktop" feature, I think it's just a hack to circumvent the
inherent limitation of icons on the desktop)

Last point, people are used to icons on the desktop. There is not much I
can do about this, just maybe try to convince people that there could be
other ways to achieve the same goal :)

Cheers,
Olivier.
-- 
 - Olivier Fourdan - fourdan at xfce.org - http://www.xfce.org -