Aspiebloggen

Hello and welcome to Aspiebloggen podcast episode 9. I am your host Tommy Eriksson. In todays episode my view on desktop icons.

This is the podcast where I bring you my views on things, in an attempt to let my voice be heard and to grow my confidence. For too long I have not voiced my opinions on the things that matter to me but that will all change now.

Some of what I will bring up will be about asperger and autism related stuff since that is what my blog is about, but most will be my opinions on things and what is going on in my life. My website is at aspiebloggen.se. There you will find the show notes for each episode as well my other blog posts. The blog itself is in Swedish but this podcast and the corresponding show notes will always be in English.

Now let’s get started.

Todays episode is brought to you by the letter E.

This is actually the very first thing I talked about. Back before starting I made some test recordings to see if I really could do this, if my voice would work and if I could come up with stuff to talk about since I wasn’t planning on scripting the episodes. The subject I chose was desktop icons because that was the first thing I could think about that I wasn’t likely to actually make an episode about. This podcast was supposed to be about asperger and autism related stuff as my first intro says. Well then things changed and I realized after making a few episodes that this podcast would not only be about asperger since I couldn’t come up with enough material to fill a podcast about it so now I wanna return to this subject.

So what are your opinion on desktop icons. Me I think that they are great. I love having them on my desktop, others are of the opposite view and don’t want any icons at all. They want their desktops clean. Me I value the easy access that they bring, even though they do need to be managed or else chaos happens. And before you ask about why I don’t simply use panels, well I do. Since I use Mate as a desktop environment I can have panels both on the top of the screen and at the bottom. The lower one displays all open folders and running programs. The upper one have many shortcuts on it.

I have tried all desktop environments that can run Manjaro Linux, which is almost all of them, and none gave me the control and functionality that I wanted except for Mate. KDE comes close but has the annoying habit of opening a small, I don’t know how to describe it, a small process perhaps that showed up in the taskmanager every time I opened a mp3 and perhaps other files as well. Since I often begin listening to a song and then change to another this soon leads to a full taskmanager if only for a while. KDE is also resource heavy which is bad for my old computer. It has been nearly 2 years since last I tried out the various DE:s so maybe something has changed.

Anyway Cinnamon will not allow easy adding and removing shortcuts in the top panel and has a very large section in the middle where nothing can be altered. LXDE has desktop icons but like XFCE it doesn’t allow them to be moved around other than on a grid. Or am I remembering wrong. Openbox uses a thirdparty program for icons and if I remember correctly ordering them is not possible. Also, panels are third party and not easy to customize directly. If I remember correctly you have to edit files to get what you want. Gnome is a bloated piece of crap which looks awful and has that stupid sidebar to the left and other stuff. Or am I confusing it with Ubuntu?

Now I’m hardly puritan and have programs from both KDE and XFCE. I love K3B for burning discs and the file renamer from XFCE is the easiest one to use. I’m not trying to run a minimalistic installation so if I see a program that could do what I want then I install it even if it belongs to another DE.

The icons on the desktop does change a little depending on my interests. There was a time when I had icons about editing movies as well as making music. The icons were for Guvcview, Openshot, Kdenlive and Linux MultiMedia Studio. Well only the first one is installed now. The others wont be installed again anytime soon. I tried learning Blender last fall and had an icon for that but I soon lost interest and uninstalled the program.

And those was just the fixed icons that litter the edge of the desktop. I also have various amounts of icons more to the center but those are only supposed to be there for a short time before they get deleted or put in a folder. Most of the current once are about LED:s and how to wire them. Lots of PDF:s pulled from various websites as well as movies showing LED:s lighting up model railroads in impressive ways. Needless to say but if you prefer desktops that are clear of icons you don’t want to see mine.

If you do go with having many icons then make sure to organize them or it defeats the purpose of having them. If everything is just a mess then you might as well use menus instead. Well everyone has their preference and I for one am not about to lecture about one way or another. Do as you please since it’s you computer after all.

Well that will be all for now. The shownotes for this episode will be at aspiebloggen.se/9. Until next time, take care.

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