Re: [Proposal] Remove some stuff from Application menu

[Shaun McCance <shaunm wolfram com>]

On Tue, 2003-07-01 at 17:09, Reinout van Schouwen wrote:
> On Tue, 1 Jul 2003, Luca Ferretti wrote:
> 
> > IMHO a XD2 like approach can be more simple. I don't think ad a Go menu
> > on panel is a good idea. I like something like:
> >      1. rename "$USER Home" icon on desktop as "Personal Files" (do we
> >         need to expose the home concept to all users?)
> 
> Yes! Yes! Yes! That would be SO much easier from an l10n standpoint. And
> get rid of the home icon while we're at it. :)

No! No! No!

I'll give my reasons in a moment, after I question the l10n argument.  I
can certainly see how home could produce difficulties in l10n, but is it
actually a problem at this point?  What I mean is, we've been doing this
i18n stuff for a while now, and I would assume (I don't know) that home
has already been translated.  Are there languages where home presents a
l10n problem that hasn't already been solved?

Now the reasons:

I don't think "the home concept" is all that hard.  I mean, it's just
where you put stuff.  Is it really that hard to understand that I put
stuff in my home directory?  As for "Personal Files", I'm not sure that
everything in my home directory qualifies as personal.

The home directory is so thoroughly entrenched in Unix and Unix-like
systems that trying to remove it is an exercise in futility.  First,
you'll have a huge number of people loading up Gnome and screaming,
"Where is my home directory?"  Second, even if Gnome went through all
the effort of removing all references to home from all programs and all
documentation, you'll never get home removed from all the programs and
documentation that aren't Gnome.

Imagine a user calling tech support for some software.  Tech support
needs to refer the user to some file in his home directory.  The user
doesn't have any idea what this "home directory" is.  Imagine some new
user jumping on to some online forums for help.

Basically, in the interest of making the system marginally (and very
marginally) more learnable the first time a user runs it, you'd be
making it less learnable in the long run, because you'd be locking the
user out of a huge amount of information.  You can't possibly shield
users from the home directory, so masking its existence will only hurt
them in the long run.

--
Shaun