Comment 6 for bug 898201

"kindof the plasma-desktop approach"
That's what i got in mind too. I don't know if marlin drawing the destkop really make sense, i like the kde plasma approach, i don't think a desktop is resumed to icons only. But while in the past the desktop was the only overlay, today with gnome-shell or unity with respectively the activities overlay and the lenses, the desktop is less and less interesting. Still thoses new overlays are very limited and we're far from what our old desktop have to offer. So it's a dilema :) (to draw or not to draw the desktop)

From the existing, we already got applications similar to the folder widget plasma like screenlet and recently i discovered another project called DesktopFolders, which is a light weight clone of the screenlet FolderView widget coded in vala.
http://www.terra.es/personal7/inigoserna/DesktopFolders/

Althought i could just embed a marlin icon view in a transparent windows with some tailored arrangement like what u just said ltr rtl etc.

There's some other nice project/idea about a temporary place to organize stuff for the desktop i found interesting like The Board(but i think it's kinda dead), grape for macos is somewhat, a really interesting idea too http://tayasui.com/Grape.html

As u see for the moment i didn't even started anything about the desktop, i am still questioning myself and it's not even sure i'll do something about it. If u have some interesting ideas please step up :)