Re: [Proposal] Remove some stuff from Application menu

[John Kodis <kodis comcast net>]

On Mon, Jul 07, 2003 at 04:34:47PM -0500, Shaun McCance wrote:

> Newbie: How do I do X?
> Guru: Go into your home directory....
> Newbie: I don't know where my home directory is.
> Guru: Go buy an introductory book on Unix/Linux.

Apple, a company known for their attention to user-friendliness, also
uses "Home" with a house icon to represent the user's home directory,
at least in the OS-X version of the finder (Apple's GUI file manager).

This gives us another hypothetical support scenario:

    Mac convert: Hey, there's no Home icon on this "Nautilus" finder
		 thing! 
    Gnome guide: Yes there is.  See where it says "Personal files"
		 with the meaningless icon?  That's your home
		 directory. 
    Mac convert: Oh.  Why didn't they just call it "Home", like
		 everyone else does?
    Gnome guide: "Home" isn't user-friendly enough.  You'll have to
		 get used to the new name.
    Mac convert: Oh.  Okay, thanks.

While I don't think that the difference between "Home" and "Personal
files" is all that significant, I am concerned that too much emphasis
on making the Gnome desktop easy to use for someone who has never seen
a computer before (which is how the concern over a user not being able
to figure out what "Home" might mean strikes me) will end up making
the actual location of things fairly undiscoverable.  This seems like
a disservice to our users.

The Unix file system layout isn't that complex or intimidating, and
let's face it, it's still something with which anyone who's
administering their own machine should have at least a passing
familiarity.  Abstracting this out too far ends up complicating the
learning process rather than simplifying it by forcing all but the
most casual the user to learn both the abstraction, the reality, and
the mapping between the two.

Here too, even Apple's finder provides an icon of a disk that takes
you to the root of the file system, and rather than being confused by
this, Mac users sing the praises of the user-friendliness of their
desktop.

-- John Kodis.