Sidebars and Gadgets and Plasmoids, Oh My!

The Question is: How do you use your desktop?

There seems to be an obsession lately with having little widgets, sidebars, gadgets and such on ones desktop.

It started back with the Google Desktop Sidebar, then Vista had it’s own Windows Sidebar, now Windows 7 is morphing the Windows Sidebar into floating Gadgets, and even the Linux/UNIX KDE 4.x.x desktop has it’s Plasmoids and there is a package for the GNOME desktop called gDesklets. It seems everyone wants these little things on their desktop…except for me.

Personally, I rarely ever see my desktop! Every user, however, is different. My co-worker in the next cubicle has a whole slew of icons and documents and who knows what else taking up over half of his desktop, yet I never, ever save anything there. In fact, I usually hide my desktop icons – why? I never see them!

The same goes for the “gadgets” and such. Usually, the “Windows Sidebar” is the first thing I disable in my ritualistic pruning of Windows Vista into a usable Operating System, as it seems to use anywhere from 12-24MB of RAM. Now, with modern machines with multi-gig RAM configurations, that may seem trivial, but why would I want to just waste RAM on something I will never see, nor use?

Perhaps I’m just old fashioned, or just set in my ways, but here is how my desktop is usually set up:

• Desktop Icons hidden
• Quick Launch icons set to Large
• Windows Explorer and Recycle Bin icons added to Quick Launch.
• Other frequently used applications “pinned” to the Start Menu with “Small Icons” set in the Start Menu’s preferences

Here are a couple of screenshots:

This configuration just seems to work for me. My taskbar is fairly “clean” at the moment (I actually rebooted my machine earlier today – which is really a rarity ), but often I have a whole slew of things open: Virtual Machines in VirtualBox, multiple browser windows (often multiple browser apps), instant messages, Remote Desktop Sessions, PuTTY sessions, Word docs, Excel files, etc. Most of these applications are “maximized” and it would take me ages to even get to my desktop, much less check a “gadget” to see what the temperature is outside, or see a thumbnail slideshow of the photos in my “Pictures” directory.

I guess I could summarize by saying “The desktop metaphor, to me, is very 1990’s”. Don’t you think it’s time to move on? With the exception of the gadgets (which thankfully don’t seem to be turned on by default), Windows 7 is a great move in the right direction, and I do like the new design of the taskbar – and I am very thankful all traces of the horridly archaic “Classic” Start Menu appear to be forever gone!