Thanks for telling me about the desktop being gone. I really wondered and am a bit surprised as I thought most people valued and used a desktop area quite a bit. Yes, I opened up my home directory from the places and then opened the desktop folder from there. Actually, I think my desktop was actually a top level folder in my places menu but still, not the same. In fact, I have had launchers on the desktop in the past but I guess I could get them on there again if I wanted. It's just that the desktop was typically addressable from a single keystroke before. Well whatever...
I've heard comments like that before about gnome getting less and less configurable; pretty soon, it will be like that other windows operating system out there.
