I store thousands of files directly on the desktop folder.
When I tell that to some people, they begin to yell "you're making the computer slower!" without any rigorous arguments whatsoever, just like the reaction one often gets on whether emptier disk or less fragmentated files leads to a better performance.
This answer deals with millions of files, which is much more than what I'm having. However, files on desktop is different in that it is shown on the desktop view, most importantly would be that they're shown at all times.
Does putting many files on desktop affect computer performance?