Re: [Nautilus-list] Integration of gmc and nautilus desktop directories.

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Jeff Waugh <jdub aphid net> writes:

> <quote who="Havoc Pennington">
> 
> > public_html is a hard one. Nautilus and Evolution should be
> > dot-directories, they annoy me in command line mode too. Or would if I
> > didn't have 500 disorganized things in ~ anyway. ;-) Since they are
> > only program-edited I don't get why I have to see them.
> 
> As much as I dislike magic files or folders, perhaps some educated magery
> could help here. For long-time "standard" things such as public_html,
> perhaps a perky icon is in order.
> 
> Of course, if anyone says anything like "My Web Files", I'd be the first to
> fire up the flamethrower. ;)
> 
> What are the main reasons that make "hackers" see this as a bad thing?

Well, I think the problem is twofold:

 - Lots of random apps do put stuff there by default
   (I have axhome/ office52/ News/ Mail/, etc)

 - I might want to have the ability to choose 

   a) What appears on my desktop (things that should be accessible
      quickly through the file manager)

   b) What is in my home directory

   Independently. Most novice users probably don't care. Most
   experienced userse are probably quite attached to their home
   direct layout.

There is a conceptual simplicity to making them unified. I'm
not sure that given a) we'd have to do lots of magic to hide
stuff b) it would have to be configurable; that that conceptual
simplicity turns into real simplicity.


I will repeat one thing:

 THE DESKTOP DIRECTORY SHOULD NOT BE A HIDDEN FILE

KDE has it right with Desktop/. We got it wrong, and continue to get
it wrong. Users data files should not go into

And actually, it would be very, very nice if we could share a common
directory with KDE, though there are some issues that would need to be
resolved with magic device files and so forth.

Regards,
                                        Owen