I do a lot of looking at my desktop. Whenever I don't have a window open, in fact, or just feel like navigating to one of my 8 desktops . It seems to me that the desktop is largely a waste of space. We need to have something behind our windows, and a picture looks nice, but it doesn't really do something. Desktops that look like the family computer's (around 50 icons randomly scattered) are pointless, as those 50 items are impossible to navigate. Desktops like mine, with only a few icons, usually aren't too useful either, as the few icons are generally hidden behind windows. This is probably why a default Ubuntu install has no icons - a good idea imho.

So what should the desktop be like? Should it be filled with a raft of gadgets, much as can be done with Vista's sidebar, Mac's Dashboard, and the plethora of desktop widget programs available for Linux (notably Screenlets, which I used previously) ?

Then we have the Windows 'Start' menu, KDE's big K button, the Computer menu, Gnome's Menu Bar, etc. The Computer menu I have (gnome-main-menu) is pretty good, and it handles most of the stuff I need, although I use the Gnome Menu Bar for most stuff - the Applications, Places and System menus work well for me. The Computer menu provides frequently used applications, search, some links, and some info on my system. But if it needs to block out an application anyway, why not make it much bigger? That way it could also become much more useful...

So, overall, I think we have a nice looking but rather dysfunctional desktop, and a main menu that isn't useful enough What should we do?

Well, why not merge the two into one? We can have a desktop that looks nice and at the same time does useful stuff. I do quite like seeing my nice organic wallpaper in the background while typing this. We don't want loads of ugly text polluting our 'background' all the time. So... if we merge the 'Start' button, or 'Computer' button or whatever you call it into the 'Show Desktop' or 'Hide All Windows' button, our nice big menu with plenty of useful information, links, eye candy and everything else can be displayed with one click. Clicking the button again will hide it and bring it back to where we are. The default display on the desktop could be this menu, which will just disappear after a minute of inactivity on it, to be replaced with a nice wallpaper, or slideshow, or whatever normally occupies your desktop. This'd be far more useful than existing solutions.

On a side note, SymphonyOS is doing something along these lines with their Mezzo desktop. At the moment, however, it doesn't feel too useful (just my opinion) and it appears to totally abandon the traditional wallpaper.

What do you think?