Re: $HOME as desktop

[Ole Laursen <olau hardworking dk>]

Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com> writes:

>  - Upgrades: user upgrades to Red Hat 14.7. Suddenly,
>    they have 531 files on their desktop, many of
>    which don't fit on the screen. Unless they think
>    to "clean up", some of these files may be lost
>    forever because they are way off the screen.

Hm, regardlessly, you shouldn't be able to lose files this way, should
you?

>    I think it's unreasonable to expect users to 
>    spend a day cleaning their home directory just
>    because they switched to a new version of GNOME.

That's a problem. But is it really a large problem? For the 1.4->2.0
transition, lots of people had to throw away their GNOME
configurations, anyway.

>  - We don't control the other software the user
>    runs, we don't control what software they run
>    in the past; you may claim that everybody
>    should change, but that isn't realistic; looking
>    in my home directory.

Why does this really have to be a problem? Add support for a .hidden
file that contains a list of files which shouldn't be displayed. Then
in the right-click menu for files, have a "Hide" entry that puts the
file name in .hidden and pops up a window with all the currently
hidden files. Then that window could support drag & drop to
hide/reshow files. Or something like that.

We could even provide a default .hidden file with a list of known
broken names.

So currently $HOME-as-desktop sucks a little because of this legacy
problem, but a general solution seems to be extremely easy to
implement. If it were in fact implemented, would that change people's
mind about the subject?

>  - Quality user experience depends on consistency;
>    not just within GNOME, but for all apps. How 
>    are Mozilla, and OpenOffice.org, and the 
>    Java file selector, and ... going to get the
>    behavior right if GNOME uses ~ and KDE uses Desktop/ ?

Unless ~/Desktop is _enforced_, you wouldn't have consistency, anyway,
would you? There would need to be globally accessible setting somewhere.

-- 
Ole Laursen
http://www.cs.auc.dk/~olau/