I proposed a approach to simplifying and solving the desktop icon layout issue about two or three years ago in the gnome.org bugzilla database, but my proposal was ignored.  My belief is that Nautilus should perform icon title truncation like that which is done by Windows.  So, for example "One Two Three Four -- Here's a long icon title" might appear as "One Two Three --...".  Then, on a MouseOver event, the title would be rerendered in its complete form as highlighted text in a textbox.  Moving the mouse pointer off of the textbox dismisses the textbox.  There might need to be some maximum width for the textbox, where rediculouslylongstringsthatgoonandonforeverwithoutanyseparationcharaters get wrapped.  I'm not sure how that should be handled, but I wonder how windows does it.  I am all for desktop differentiation from Windows, but only when there is real usability benefit.  Otherwise, meeting user expectations with desktop consistency far outweighs the benefits of tweaking UI.

The benefits I see to this implementation are:

Layout of desktop icons becomes vastly simpler, because the icon layout becomes a grid with the exception of those pesky (to me) enlarged or shrunken icons that Nautilus supports.  Still, not having to contend with variable height icon labels would greatly increase the consitency of icon layout, which would (I think) lead to fewer UI layout bugs -- a byproduct of K.I.S.S..  Personally, I would do away with enlarged and shrunken icons, but everytime I mention this I get shouted down with reasons that simply make no sense to me.

On to your comment about allowing users to put icons where they want to.  I disagree that this should be an option.  Sure, allow users to place an icon in a region, but having icons or icon labels overlap is harnful to the usability of the desktop.  I am not saying that there should be a mandatory "snap to grid" layout.  I am just saying that when the grid is disabled, newly added icons should never overlap another icon unless all the desktop is filled with icons (something that I have seen my wife do with her Apple OS/X desktop for some insane reason).

In addition to the problem of icons positioned by users is the issue of icons that are put of the desktop as a result of persistent network connections, hotplug events for firewire, PCMCIA and USB devices.  When devices, drives and drive partitions are detected during the setup of the desktop, oftentimes the associated icons are overlapped when the user icons are added.  This is just plain wrong.  To resolve this particular problem, I suggest Nautilus render user icons first, so that other mechanisms (hotplug, etc) add the icons around the user-defined icons (documents, program links, etc).

One last observation, Windows has one more feature that I find quite appealing.  When the desktop is set to automatically place icons in a grid, I can click on an icon and drag it around the sequence of icons.  The icons (as I am sure you know) are arranged from top-left to bottom-left in columns that stack from left to right.  So, dragging an icon from the middle of the leftmost column to the middle of a second column causes all the icons between the icon's initial and new position to shift up in the stack.  This enables very straightforward position of icons in heirarchy of  frequency of use.  At least, this is how I utilise it.  So, I would very much like to see Nautilus support this as an optional layout method.

Comments, questions and concerns?

Thanks,
      Miles