This post discusses the possibility of replacing the traditional desktop with a new design. “Desktop” here just means the interface that displays the desktop folder and maybe a few “widgets, not the whole shell.

Fig 1. The conventional desktop, hidden behind the windows.

The traditional desktop has several downsides:

It is obscured by windows. You have to move all the windows out of the way to use it. If you’re dragging and dropping between the desktop and apps, then you have to make sure these apps don’t obscure the part of the desktop you’re interested in. You cannot move the desktop.

The traditional desktop offers virtually no benefits over a file manager.

Desktop applets are inferior to apps and can’t be moved around as easily as windows.

The desktop makes your workspace look messy. Things just look much nicer if your background is background – and not a collection of random widgets and icons.

The proposed design attempts to solve some of these problems.

The main work area looks like this:

Fig 2. Main work area.

There is just one top panel, styled like Gnome panel. It offers fast access to the last three active windows, menubar items for each of these windows, and window min/max/resize/drag/close. (TODO: more on the panel later).

The desktop overlay is triggered on Super+D or by moving the mouse to the bottom left corner (D). It can be escaped on Esc or by moving the mouse back to the same corner or to the top corner.

It is illustrated in Fig.2 below:

Fig 3. Desktop Overlay mockup.

Main features of the new design:

The desktop overlay is part of a larger series of overlays, modeled on Gnome shell. You can see what other overlays are available in the top-left corner of the screen (they are: window overview, global search, desktop, and installed apps – more on those later). Desktop is accessible from a the bottom left hot corner. When the desktop appears, the left edge of the screen becomes sticky to allow you to easily use the dock even if you have a monitor on the left. (See the post on hot corners and edges for more) The desktop could accommodate arbitrary widgets (like KDE Plasma’s implementation) but by default it has the clipboard and the desktop folder (or some other folder) as the main ones. Widgets are arranged as tiles and tabs. They don’t float freely. The dock is part of the larger series of overlays (it also appears in the window switcher and list of installed apps). Other than that it works like a regular dock. The active window is automatically resized and tiled side by side with the desktop.