Re: Should Desktop = Home?

[Maciej Katafiasz <mnews22 wp pl>]

[snip redundant argument on $HOME vs Desktop]

Hmm, I don't really like beating dead horse all over again, but anyway,
here's recap of why $HOME == Desktop is not good idea:

1. Legacy apps - you can't change them all, and I'm not gonna ask my
system "could you please not put your cruft on my desktop?". If *I* want
something on *my* desktop, *I* put it there, not the other way around
(That's exactly why epi's / FF's idea to drop everything on desktop is
totally braindead. *I* am the one to decide what goes on *my* desktop)

2. $HOME is $HOME, desktop is desktop. Desktop is my, personally choosen
subset of things I want to interact with on constant basis. $HOME OTOH
is kind of dumparea - _everything_ I ever interact with goes there. To
bring the analogy again - I don't prepare meals on my desktop, even
though I do that at my home

3. Even if I were to use $HOME as my desktop, I am not going to organize
everything in such a way that allows me to even remotely retain control,
I simply have too much stuff. And again, I am _not_ going to ask
software not to bring stuff on _my_ desktop. Period. (Not to
mention .hidden is horrible hack anyway, if I put less used dir in
there, how am I going to access it at a later time, huh?)

4. Possibilty of screwup - since we'd work by explicitly disallowing
stuff from desktop, rather than explicitly allowing it (which, as I
said, is silly and also unacceptable in *my* personal space), if
something fails to work correctly then random cruft pops up on user's
desktop. And since desktop is user's and *noone* else, she's free to
delete it at will. Which will probably result in screwup of some kind.
That is unacceptable - failure can mean lack of additional
functionality, *never* can it result in putting user at danger

Having said that, I'm not going to engage in this discussion again, I
don't want to waste valuable bandwidth that could be used for better
things (and also for ph33r of markmc ;)

Cheers,
Maciej

-- 
"Tautologizm to coś tautologicznego"
   Maciej Katafiasz <mnews2 wp pl>
       http://mathrick.blog.pl