proposal to remove the "Start Here" icon

[K. Spearel]

On Sat, 2004-07-17 at 10:37, Owen Taylor wrote:
> On Fri, 2004-07-16 at 19:20, Mike Fedyk wrote:
> > Brent Fox wrote:
> > 
> > >I propose that we remove the "Start Here" icon from the default desktop
> > >for the following reasons:
> > >
> > >- It presents the same choices that the Main Menu does, just in a
> > >different way.  This is potentially confusing and inconsistent.  The
> > >Menu is a much faster way to launch apps anyway.
> > >  
> > >
> > But it's nice to have one window with all of the "panels" available for 
> > double clicking on.  It's a pain to have to go through the menu to get 
> > to each pref panel especially on low resolution.
> 
> Just to give some historical background, when we introduced Start Here
> in Red Hat 8 or so, our goal, or at least, my goal, was to deemphasize
> and hopefully eventually get rid of the big panel menu.
> 
> For apps there are basically three things the user might want to do:
> 
>  - Start an app they are
>    already familiar with. Finding an item two levels
>    deep in a big menu is an awful way to do this. You want to encourage,
>    even force the user to make a favorites menu entry for it.
> 
>  - Start an app that they don't know about yet to accomplish a 
>    particular task. The panel menu is an awful way of searching for
>    an app to do a particular task.
> 
>  - Browse through the apps on the system seeing what cool things
>    they can do. The panel menu is an awful way of browsing apps on 
>    the system.
>    
> I'd much rather see a menu used only as a short list of favorite
> applications and common actions like "logout" and have a real app
> browser for everything else.
> 
> But I've never been very successful at pushing this point of view...
> 
> Regards,
> 					Owen

While I agree that "Start Here" is a rather lame label, I would rather 
have seen the label changed to something more intuitive...although I
seem to remember reading that removal is already a done deal.

Rather than giving a long exposition on "the way the desktop ought to be
according to Karen" since I doubt anyone cares, I am just going to ask a
few questions and see if it engenders any discussion.

Why does it seem that developers/people in charge are so eager to remove
things from the desktop?  Should the desktop not be the users primary
way of accessing the system?  Why shouldn't the desktop present icons so
a simple point and click will bring up 90% of all the things a user
typically does in a day's work?  Does anyone agree that perhaps the
reason for the lack of acceptance of the Linux desktop is what I see as
a bias on the part of "those in charge" away from using truly graphical
methods and a reliance on the keyboard to do the heavy lifting?  Isn't a
point and click on a desktop icon even more efficient than launching
from a menu?  Shouldn't the desktop be easily configurable as the
ultimate "Favorites Menu"?

While I realize that most all of the tools are in place already so that
one can cover her desktop in just the way suggested above, I wonder why
the default Fedora desktop is so barren and under-utilized.  Surely it
can be used for more important purposes than displaying some pretty
wallpaper.

KAS