LWN: Comments on "ROX Desktop provides light, quirky alternative to GNOME and KDE (Linux.com)"

Save to Desktop; Drag-and-Drop

bobacus — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 13:49:06 +0000

"Save to Desktop" is, as I see it, a MS Windows-ism, and a rather poor one to imitate - in my sysadmin experience on Windows, it has led to files being saved in a user's Profile rather than their home directory, causing the integrity of files to be dependant on the integrity of the Roaming Profile system, or else for files to be unknowingly stored on a local PC rather than the network. It sounds like ROX Desktop is simply treating icons on the desktop as shortcuts/symlinks, instead of making it a file store in its own right - and it mimicks RISC OS in this respect.

I for one think there is more milage to be gained from the use of drag-and-drop. In RISC OS applications, you could save a file by dragging an icon to a filer window, avoiding the frustration of hunting around for the directory within the save dialogue box when you already have it open as a Filer window. (You could also type in the directory path directly if you wanted.) I'd like to see this implemented in X applications, alongside the existing directory navigation control.

Rob

ROX Desktop provides light, _quirky_ alternative

gvy — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 10:03:22 +0000

Well there are other stupid or questionable things there -- e.g. drag-and-drop into special widget to change the desktop background is a bit artifical; using gtk2 results in heavy problems for those using 8-bit locales and not ascii or utf-8 -- but that's gtk2's authors' brain damage.

Worst thing we've stumbled upon is that ROX keeps desktop content "virtual", all the pictograms are XML "symlinks" which rather leads to the data loss scenario: "I've put the file on the desktop from the floppy (or erased it from that folder) AND IT'S NOT THERE ANYMORE!".

Now *that* doesn't give me confidence in this upstream, it's rather XFCE/Thunar to be used as light environment than IceWM/ROX-Filer (IceWM itself is just fine for semi-kiosks).

ROX Desktop provides light, quirky alternative to GNOME and KDE (Linux.com)

Arker — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 18:43:54 +0000

The reviewer doesn't like the fact that it ships with click-to-raise turned off. This doesn't give me any confidence in the reviewer ;) I mean, really, wtf?

I turn on click-to-raise for certain customers - specifically the ones that have a hard enough time using one application at a time and just get horribly confused doing anything more. For anyone else, though, it's just a horrible way to cripple a good system.