Desktop Icons

We all have known about these at least since Windows 95 or even earlier. Some people nowadays would rather have empty desktops and pin everything on the taskbar or just use the star menu/start screen. Some people still use icons however. Some keep it to a minimum, others have a messy array of programs and files all over their screen. Some people keep tabs and use 3rd party programs to organize many icons.

What are your thoughts on icons, how many do you have and how are they organized?

I despise shortcuts on my desktop. That said, I do keep some files on my desktop, but only the ones that I am working with at the moment. Once I am done with something, I move it off of my desktop, or delete the file if it is no longer necessary.

My desktop computer's a mess as I usually do file transfers and just dump them on the desktop. Meanwhile my tablet and laptop have pretty much nothing; I just access any apps via the start screen.

I used to have mine messy on my old laptop but now I only have 4 nicely lined up for iTunes, a mmorpg I used to play, a bookmark I needed and the recycle bin. I don't use many programs on my laptop anyway, just Word, Photoshop, iTunes and Chrome mostly and half of those are pinned. Also, with the way Windows 8 is set up, I can just easy hit the windows button and search what I want instead of having clutter.

I don't have desktop icons on mine. XD I have a mac laptop, that's why. However, I do have a ton of screenshots I have yet to clean up. Most of them are ones I took of PelleK from his youtube videos. I don't want to get rid of them because well... they are all of him. <3

I chose to replace the W7 icons with W8 Metro Start Menu icons, so and organized in a way so its minimal yet productive. From Computer | Media | Productivity | Games. I don't need all the icons I have on there, but it makes it look nice the way it is, less would kinda ruin it. Not a big fan of the no icons look, or the lots of icons look. :P

A desktop without icons looks just blank to me. I was raised with desktop icons, so that's why I continue to use them. I do use taskbar shortcuts as well, though.

Tsutarja said:

A desktop without icons looks just blank to me. I was raised with desktop icons, so that's why I continue to use them. I do use taskbar shortcuts as well, though.

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But the icons get in the way of the pretty wallpaper!

Buoysel said:

But the icons get in the way of the pretty wallpaper!

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That's why you use wallpapers that look great with icons on the side! :D

Sometimes, being creative with icon arrangement and/or wallpaper choices do a lot.

I have a lot of icons in there, but all of them are either app shortcuts or location shortcuts. The only thing that isn't is the Minecraft launcher stub.

Buoysel said:

But the icons get in the way of the pretty wallpaper!

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Twiggy said:

That's why you use wallpapers that look great with icons on the side! :D

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^ this.

Most of my wallpapers always have their main elements in the center, and usually I have no more than two or three rows of icons at once on my desktop. I'm careful when I choose wallpapers to know where icons will and won't interfere.

Tsutarja said:

^ this.

Most of my wallpapers always have their main elements in the center, and usually I have no more than two or three rows of icons at once on my desktop. I'm careful when I choose wallpapers to know where icons will and won't interfere.

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I still think placing icons on a picture takes away form the visual aspect of the image. I think wallpapers just look better without icons on them. But I have seen some creative uses with icons and wallpapers.

Besides, it's faster to hit the Start key on the keybard and type what you want than it is to shift through a sea of icons looking for what you want.

My desktop is messy IMO, I try to stay on top of it but it's just a struggle.

I gradually outgrew desktops. Mine is disabled.

Everything is accessible through the Activities panel, anyways, and that opens with a super key.

I've only got two icons on my desktop- the Recycle Bin, and a folder called 'Stuff' (aka, my dumping ground for miscellaneous files that would've been dropped on the desktop otherwise). When I was younger, I had to deal with family members that would save every single file to the desktop and make a million different shortcuts, so I vowed that when I had my own computer, I'd keep the desktop as tidy as possible. Granted, my misc. folder is filled with things I haven't looked at in ages, but at least my desktop looks clean :p

Icons that are different colors look really cluttered to me, so I downloaded a monochrome icon set and change them to all white/all black depending on what wallpaper I'm using.

I use Fences too, which lets you arrange your icons in scroll boxes on your Desktop, that way I can have all my icons there without it looking too cluttered (I literally put eeeverything on my Desktop, lol). I also made the box invisible so the scrollbar only shows up when I hover over it.

I'm on my Surface Pro right now, so I'll just dig up an old screenshot from my photobucket:

My MacBook doesn't have many icons on the desktop that i'm double clicking often, except for the ones that have pictures which i'll upload to Photobucket. But I do like that Mac computers have the sidebar on the bottom of the screen that provides shortcuts to various applications, however.

My current desktop is brand new and I only have my essentials on it. Chrome, Skype, Steam, and Uplay. Besides that, I have a few more things on the "Start Menu" thing for Windows 8, but I prefer Desktop View.

The point of the desktop is to be a ground for accessing programs and folders, so I let it fill with icons. I have commonly used programs pinned to the start menu, and regard the desktop as the 'list of everything'. Organisation is mostly alphabetical, with certain directories manually sorted at the start (top left) of the list. I did have a sort of custom taskbar locked to the left side of the screen (opposite the actual Windows taskbar which I keep on the right) listing these directories in Windows XP, but initially only managed to do that by accident and can't reproduce it in Windows 7.

i hate having anything on my desktop
cleanliness is next to godliness

Juno said:

I use Fences too, which lets you arrange your icons in scroll boxes on your Desktop, that way I can have all my icons there without it looking too cluttered (I literally put eeeverything on my Desktop, lol). I also made the box invisible so the scrollbar only shows up when I hover over it.

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^ This.

I love having icons available for quicker access, but I hate the clutter.
I have three separate Fences boxes with about 50 icons between them - one for the games I'm actively playing, one for co-op games my boyfriend actually will play, and one for misc. crap I didn't put on my dock. Just double-click to hide/show them, and the whole "fences" are gone and everything looks streamlined.

Dock is a mess of games, and below that is a black bar from Vark for Rainmeter that creates text shortcuts. That gets mostly used for quicker access to my school work, with a few other programs like Cyborg's profile editor for my mouse and nvidia's GeForce experience, and Defraggler and what have you. It could use some reorganizing, honestly, but it doesn't look terrible. :v
With all of my save files in my documents, my school folder was buried elsewhere. :P

My IM clients are on my start menu, which may explain why I never sign into Skype. I never go over there anymore unless I'm specifically looking for something; just about everything I need is on my desktop. I should move that to my Vark bar. And my taskbar is on the top of the screen with Steam and 3 different browsers. :v

Sometimes, I'll put gamebanner rainmeter links on my second monitor for Origin games, if I'm actually playing an Origin game at the time. Otherwise it's only ever used to keep chats open and visible while my primary is in-game. :P

And a linky to my mess. In between Spelunky and The Evil Within is what happens to your icons when you use CursorLock because dual monitors. Not like there's any pretty icons for Warlock 2, anyway.