Comment by anentropic

I remember in the old days the desktop was like a starting point. You'd open the drive that had the program you wanted to use, double click it. Or a little later you could double click the document you wanted to edit and the relevant application would start up automatically and open the doc.

Now I never see my desktop. A handful of apps, primarily Chrome, are permanently open in front of it. The computer is always on, if I reboot then the previous state more or less restores automatically.

So the desktop itself is not really prime real estate any more. It's more of an abstract idea, the layer underneath all the useful bits. The windows have taken over.

On macOS the desktop path is where screenshots go... so mostly I just have a litter of 100s of screenshots there.

Communicating at work seems to involve taking lots of screenshots.

Usually these are files I don't really care to keep around, I just need it in the moment so I can add it to a message in Slack, Teams, Jira, Github etc.

So it feels like this primitive could maybe be built into the OS in a more developed way than just screen area -> file, so that you could access it directly from apps (in a consistent way - as an OS feature) and avoid generating junk files.