I guess I have seen this for a long time but today it caught my attention. Perhaps I am missing something...

I have some rubbish on my Desk 1 desktop, some files, a couple of launchers and a couple of apps running. I switch to Desk 2 and find that the apps are not there (as expected) however the stuff ON the desktop (files, launchers) is there. I observe the same behavior on Ubuntu 7.10, 8.04 and Kubuntu 8.04. I do not have a Red Hat nor Fedora box handy and I don't recall if they did the same thing.

So I guess the question is... Is there a way to setup a CLEAN desktop without the items sitting on the #1 desktop showing?

TIA,

Ken

As far as I know this is standard behaviour in all distros. After all, if the launchers and panels were not there, you'd have to start everything in the same desktop and transfer it to where you wanted it!