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I recently noticed that the tag (notice the dot before desktop) being used as a tag for questions concerning the Desktop Environment in general (most likely because is gone):

This is only a small selection of questions misusing this tag, all taken from the first page of the question list for the tag.

I think renaming this tag, e.g. to or (or something better) could prevent or at least limit further misuse of the tag.

What do you think?

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  • Rename to desktop-launcher without the dot, maybe? Or dupe it to launcher?
    – muru
    Commented Dec 9, 2015 at 21:48
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    No, I don't think it's a dupe, as .desktop files are used aside from Unity's launcher (e.g. in other desktops, for file associations, ...)
    – s3lph
    Commented Dec 9, 2015 at 21:56
  • Ah, I should have read the tag wiki.
    – muru
    Commented Dec 9, 2015 at 21:57

1 Answer 1

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I'll move my proposal from the comments to an answer so that people can vote on it.

I propose to rename it to , because:

  1. Having a leading dot makes sense only when referencing desktop files by their extension; since the tag has to change but the extension won't change, there's no reason to prepend a dot to whatever nomenclature we're gonna use, since obviously it will never match the extension *;
  2. "Desktop files" is how they're referenced in the Ubuntu Community Wiki. Using the same name will allow to keep consistency across the Ubuntu Community Wiki and the site.
  3. This introduces two possible choices: using the singularized or the pluralized . I'd choose the pluralized in order to be able to group toghether questions about a specific desktop file and questions about desktop files in general, which makes sense only to group toghether under a single tag.

* Before someone argues that beside this reasoning makes equal sense to : yes, mostly. But the problem is that one of the two must be preferred. Since they're both good, digressing into nitpickeries, putting the thing into what I think is the right perspective, to make a comparison, you don't say e.g. "I have a dot-mp4 file", you say "I have an mp4 file".

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    I think we need to have a very specific tag wiki then for 'desktop-file'. People may misconstrue that to mean "any file on the desktop" which can be a very bad misunderstanding
    – Thomas Ward Mod
    Commented Dec 10, 2015 at 14:07
  • @ThomasW. I agree. To start somewhere, what do you think of the current wiki for .desktop, do you think it could mislead?
    – kos
    Commented Dec 10, 2015 at 14:32
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    From my point of view, the tag wiki for .desktop already is very specific.
    – s3lph
    Commented Dec 10, 2015 at 18:34
  • @the_Seppi I think that too. Also I believe users mis-tagging a question do that because they don't read the excerpt at all. If someone does it should be pretty clear what the tag is about. The word "launcher" in the first statement should at least ring a bell.
    – kos
    Commented Dec 10, 2015 at 19:02
  • What is needed is not a tag rename, but a tag tip....
    – Braiam
    Commented Dec 11, 2015 at 5:36
  • @Braiam There's a problem with that solution: tag warnings are currently status-deferred indefinetly (and, on a side note, that feature might be removed altoghether). I.e. SE won't implement new tag warnings until a date yet to be set. So either we wait until SE decides to implement more of them or in general what to do with them or we go with the old method (and waiting = the situation gets worse in the meantime).
    – kos
    Commented Dec 11, 2015 at 8:52
  • @kos why you say that it might be removed? And the tag tip is active for wireless, no? What's the problem?
    – Braiam
    Commented Dec 11, 2015 at 12:41
  • @Braiam The fact that they're status-deferred and why is explained in the first link, the fact that the feature could be removed is mentioned in the second link. However I also noticed that it's been a while since those posts, so maybe things have changed. I asked for an update on the current status of the feature here.
    – kos
    Commented Dec 11, 2015 at 16:28
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    IMHO people will start using desktop-files to tag questions about how to place files on desktop...
    – Ivan
    Commented Dec 22, 2015 at 4:52
  • @Ivan That may well be. I also thought of desktop-entry, which is less ambiguous and is the actual name used in the freedesktop specification. The problem with that one is: I've seen almost nobody actually using it to refer to .desktop files, which I believe could make actually taking advantage of it very hard.
    – kos
    Commented Dec 22, 2015 at 10:00

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