Re: Major change in desktop handling

[textshell neutronstar dyndns org]

On Sat, May 17, 2003 at 10:01:22PM +0200, Luca Ferretti wrote:
> mmhhh good point, but IHMO to have a Home icon on desktop and a Desktop
> folder in Home is a crack too.
> 
> I mean: I'm sitting in front of computer [1], and anybody said me that
> I'm looking the desktop. On the desktop I've an Home icon and anybody
> said me that it's the place of my personal files. I open the Home and...
> I find a Desktop folder... what's appening... desktop in the home and
> home in the desktop... I feel a little anxious.... If I open the desktop
> in home, can I find the home again??? And the desktop again? And so on
> until... until.... hey I can't stop this!
> 

I always hear people don't understand the hierachical filesystem so well. It
seems to suggest that they don't see the the filesystem as hierachical. But the
Problem you describe is only a problem in a strict tree (hierachical) the UNIX
filesystem is anyway more a graph because it supports links of many kinds.
I don't see the Problem Users will usually not blindly perform a recrusive
treewalk on anything, really.

> IHMO it's a non-logic way. The desktop is the desktop and you should
> access to it only from the desktop, don't from a file manager window[2].
> If I've to change/add/remove something I don't need to open a window, I
> can do it directly from desktop.

No, the desktop is a folder on the harddrive of some machine. Don't pretent
otherwise. We shouldn't try to dump down the users. Either they don't care it's
a folder  or they should know. Well they should actually know where the stuff on
the desktop is if they think about backups and so on. (We don't want to have
users that think stuff on the desktop doesn't take space on the hard drive)


> 
> As user the desktop is a 'view of this computer', don't a folder in my
> home that I can display full screen (BTW: desktop background and
> ~/Desktop one should be the same... at least in a OO metaphor): I can
> have on it resources (personal files as Home icon or all files in ~,
> shared files as mounted devices, preferences, trash...) and stuff that I
> need/want find immediately. 
> 

I doubt that that is a good mental model of a UNIX PC. It's a bit inside out on
any operating system, but on UNIX this is espically bad because in UNIX you can
get exposed to the real layout of the filesystems on the harddisk.

Martin H.