Re: $HOME as desktop

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Fri, 2003-05-16 at 17:29, Ole Laursen wrote:

> >    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.
> 
> That's a problem. But is it really a large problem? For the 1.4->2.0
> transition, lots of people had to throw away their GNOME
> configurations, anyway.

There's a world of difference between throwing away your
GNOME configuration and throwing away all the files in
your home directory...

Also, we are trying to avoid 1.4=>2.0 type traumatic changes.

> >  - 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.
> 
> Why does this really have to be a problem? Add support for a .hidden
> file that contains a list of files which shouldn't be displayed. Then
> in the right-click menu for files, have a "Hide" entry that puts the
> file name in .hidden and pops up a window with all the currently
> hidden files. Then that window could support drag & drop to
> hide/reshow files. Or something like that.
> 
> We could even provide a default .hidden file with a list of known
> broken names.
> 
> So currently $HOME-as-desktop sucks a little because of this legacy
> problem, but a general solution seems to be extremely easy to
> implement. If it were in fact implemented, would that change people's
> mind about the subject?

I thought whole point of the $HOME as desktop exercise was to
present an easy-to-use model to users; having directories called
Mail/ in the desktop mysteriously (to novices) not be visible
doesn't really seem to achieve that for me.

(By the way, Nautilus already supports something like .hidden
files, though there isn't a GUI for it.)

> >  - 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/ ?
> 
> Unless ~/Desktop is _enforced_, you wouldn't have consistency, anyway,
> would you? There would need to be globally accessible setting somewhere.

I don't know what you mean by "enforced". If GNOME and KDE
are using the same directory by default, app developers will
catch on pretty quickly.

And that covers 99% of users and gives a good experience out of
the box. I'll shed a tear for those gconf-editing whizzes, but
they'll learn to use the Home button rather than the Desktop button.

Regards,
                                       Owen