$HOME as desktop
- From: Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>
- To: nautilus-list gnome org, desktop-devel-list gnome org
- Subject: $HOME as desktop
- Date: 16 May 2003 16:58:36 -0400
I really hesitate to jump in here, but I think it's
worth stating clearly why $HOME as desktop isn't an
option:
- Upgrades: user upgrades to Red Hat 14.7. Suddenly,
they have 531 files on their desktop, many of
which don't fit on the screen. Unless they think
to "clean up", some of these files may be lost
forever because they are way off the screen.
I think it's unreasonable to expect users to
spend a day cleaning their home directory just
because they switched to a new version of GNOME.
- We don't control the other software the user
runs, we don't control what software they run
in the past; you may claim that everybody
should change, but that isn't realistic; looking
in my home directory.
dcc - xchat is broken
evolution - evolution is broken
nsmail - Netscape 4 was broken several years ago
GNUstep - wmaker was broken when I tried to
reproduce a bug yesterday
Mail - various traditionally unixy things are broken
News - Gnus is broken
Desktop - KDE is broken
You get the picture. If we made $HOME the desktop
we force the user to choose between having useless
cruft on their desktop and not using other software.
- 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/ ?
Perhaps using $HOME is logically right, but practically
speaking I can't see how it is even a possibility at
all. We need to use ~/Desktop, and we need to spend our
ingenuity in making that seem as consistent and robust
as possible.
Regards,
Owen
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