that’s not the case with the trash widget, the Remove Widget is at the bottom of the menu and color coded red to warn you off clicking it.
but if you insist on using the icon version, the custom service menu mods discussed might allow you to rearrange or even just insert null separators or visual space into the context menu that would help
as for muscle memory, that’s always going to be a thing when adjusting to something new.
It’s a really weird thing to argue for, when it could just do the “enable trashcan” thing which both Windows and XFCE do. I don’t see why this has to be so convoluted and weird.
I would argue that the fact that Windows and XFCE has a bunch of functions (settings, configuration dialogs and such) whose whole purpose is to present on the desktop, things that look like file icons, can be moved around like file icons and among other icons that represent files, but do not actually represent files, cannot be operated on like files, and aren’t listed in the Desktop folder when looking at it using another application - to be convoluted and weird.
But I guess how weird an unintuitive people find this or that feature is mostly about what any person is used to and how the system they’ve used most of their lives had trained them, and not an actual assertion of quality.
This specific feature is one of those MS-Windows 95 inventions that will stay with us forever, regardless of how much of a good idea it is or isn’t.
Very true. We often see this when strong-willed and opinionated people switch to Plasma. They figure out that it’s very customizable, try to customize it to perfectly replicate what they’re used to, get 95% of the way there, and then end up in the uncanny valley where the missing 5% drives them bananas. 
IMO, no matter how customizable an environment is, you need to be willing to stretch a bit and accept the little design differences between it and the thing you’re switching away from. After all, if that thing was so perfect and comfortable, you wouldn’t be switching away from it!
I certainly didn’t switch from Windows because its trashcan took up space on the desktop…
Wouldn’t worry about it. In my years I’ve seen my share. The likes of “openbox is worthless cause it hasn’t updated for years etc…” kind. That particular breed ends up where they took off, at windows, nagging about how good xp was in a windows 11 era. In my days we ran xp on coal. On coal I tell ya!
Look back at Nate’s comment here, though - it sounds like what Windows and XFCE do, which you liked, was compile a collection of desktop icons from a combination of user preferences (e.g. “always show Trash/Home icons”) and files in a folder.
The KDE Plasma folder view for the desktop is strictly “the contents of ~/Desktop”, so if continually accidentally deleting the Trash desktop icon is a major pain point, that would be worth putting together into a feature request and submitting as Nate mentioned. But as it stands now, it’s just a different, simpler paradigm for “what is the source of desktop icons”.
For things on the desktop whose content is autogenerated from a .desktop file, the fact that they’re files under the hood is really an implementation detail. It seems reasonable to change the UX around them a bit such that some normal file management behaviors get overridden–probably getting deleted with the delete key, most notably. But we would want to preserve the ability to remove them somehow, so that functionality couldn’t be totally hidden. Maybe it would be one of those rare exceptions where a context-menu-only UI makes sense because we want the feature to be a bit hidden!
Of course then we’d still get bug reports about the context menu having a “delete the trash” item in it, but people will submit bug reports for anything.
Cinnamon also has an option to enable/disable those special desktop icons like trash and home folder, and the man does have a good reason to report a bug if he keeps deleting his trash icon on accident because the buttons for emptying the trash and deleting it are so close together. No need to be so defensive just because windows was mentioned, it may be really bad at many things but not all things, we can always learn a thing or two with the competition.
I don’t display anything on my desktop, other than a background image. I never have, not even when I was using Windows… well except maybe the default stuff that I couldn’t get off. So I’ve never used the Desktop for ‘It’s intended purpose’.
ur missing out.
just general organizing activities like i would organize papers and folders on my real desk.
seems perfectly natural to me.
I tend to run Applications at Maximised, as a rule I never see the desktop, so I use the filemanager, along with it’s search function for all of that. Works well for me. Always has, even on Windows. On a Linux desktop I use multiple Virtual desktops, with each open Application on it’s own desktop.
Like this,
