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Drop launchers from the Desktop

On feature/stretch they look wrong again (#11716 (closed)) so I want to finally have this discussion before I spend any time fixing them.

In favour of removing these launchers:

  • The desktop are is meant to be hidden by application windows, so it’s a poor place to access features that one may often need, such as Home or Trash.
  • This feature is a badly supported opt-in thing in GNOME these days, and I’ve seen upstream refuse to look at bugs that were only reproducible with Nautilus managing the desktop area (which is needed to have launchers on the desktop). Chances are that it’ll simply go away sooner or later.
  • Fixing them for Stretch is not free (possibly super cheap though).
  • It’s 2016 and most computer users are now used to adjust to crazy modern interfaces such as Android, OS X, Unity and GNOME Shell. So we can rely on their ability to cope with not having launchers on the desktop.

In favour of keeping (at least some) of these launchers:

  • The “Report a bug” and “Tails documentation” launchers provide obvious entry points to our documentation. Any other place will be at least a tiny less obvious.
  • A number of people are still used to GUI paradigms from the 90’s, such as this one. Changing this would make them feel less at home in Tails.

I propose that for Tails 3.0, we:

  1. move the launchers we really want to keep (“Report a bug”, “Tails documentation”) to the Favorites section, so they appear 1. as soon as one opens the applications menu, along with Tor Browser and friends (and if one argues that it’s too hard to find there, then Tor Browser is also too hard to find and then we have a bigger problem, that probably we should have heard about already); 2. in the Activities Overview (open by the Windows key or by moving the mouse to the top-left corner);
  2. drop the Home and Trash launchers entirely.

I’m open to doing this change earlier, if we prefer to introduce such UI changes one at a time, instead of all at once. I don’t care much personally, and will rely on frontdesk’s and communication/UX people’s opinion regarding what’s the best strategy here.

Related issues

Original created by @intrigeri on 11717 (Redmine)

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