Re: $HOME as desktop

[Ole Laursen <olau hardworking dk>]

Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com> writes:

> On Fri, 2003-05-16 at 17:29, Ole Laursen wrote:
> 
> > 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.
> 
> There's a world of difference between throwing away your
> GNOME configuration and throwing away all the files in
> your home directory...
> 
> Also, we are trying to avoid 1.4=>2.0 type traumatic changes.

Sure. But you don't need to throw your files away.

> > 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?
> 
> I thought whole point of the $HOME as desktop exercise was to
> present an easy-to-use model to users; having directories called
> Mail/ in the desktop mysteriously (to novices) not be visible
> doesn't really seem to achieve that for me.

I don't think novices are that likely to run Gnus or Mutt. Really. As
I see it, using $HOME as desktop can be painful for old-time Unix
users, but is much easier to explain to novices. Currently, Nautilus
is catering to the first group of people, which seems backwards since
that group is much more likely to be able to configure themselves out
of the problem.

And is the concept of having a list of hidden files more confusing
than a magic desktop folder? I don't think so.


> (By the way, Nautilus already supports something like .hidden
> files, though there isn't a GUI for it.)

Cool! Since when? Where do I find out more?

> > >  - 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.
> 
> I don't know what you mean by "enforced". If GNOME and KDE
> are using the same directory by default, app developers will
> catch on pretty quickly.

I think GNOME has momentum enough to make applications stop putting
silly things in $HOME, even if KDE isn't following the same direction.
And then "getting it right" wouldn't matter anymore for GNOME at
least, since all applications are using $HOME as the base directory
right now. They've already got it right. :-)

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