RE: Major change in desktop handling

[Thomas Vander Stichele <thomas urgent rug ac be>]

On Fri, 2003-05-16 at 21:17, Seth Nickell wrote:
> On Fri, 2003-05-16 at 08:11, Murray Cumming Comneon com wrote:
> > > From: Julien Olivier [mailto:julo altern org] 
> > > The thing is that very few apps create folders in ~/, so it could be
> > > easy to convince them to change their behaviour.
> > 
> > Nothing is that easy. But I think what you'll never avoid is some people
> > using $HOME as an install prefix. So you'll never avoid
> > $HOME/bin, $HOME/lib, $HOME/include, and so on.
> > 
> > I wish we could just use $HOME as the desktop, but reality prevents it. Time
> > to move on.
> 
> a) People's behaviors change (for example, I use ~/Applications now)
> b) The desktop can easily handle the number of folders generated by
> using $HOME as an install prefix
Sure, but I wouldn't want etc, lib, include, and so on on my desktop.  I
never *use* them in a GUI, just as I very rarely browse from /

FWIW, I can see why some people would like $HOME as the desktop, but
you'll find at least as large a group not wanting that.
For me personally, the reality is that I think $HOME is entirely the
user's domain, whether he knows about it or not, and the user should be
pretty much free to do what he likes there.
I expect programs to be polite enough to respect that view, and consider
it irritating and rude if it doesn't.  I hate that Evolution creates a
dir for it's own without allowing me to put it somewhere else.  Same
goes for a bunch of other applications.

I'd surely wouldn't want my desktop environment to suddenly start doing
the same thing and treat *my whole $HOME directory* as it's pissing
ground and start putting it on the desktop for display and creating a
bunch of directories in it.

Basically, it's pretty simple.  If all of GNOME can get by with one
subdir under $HOME, like Desktop, then that's more than enough to solve
every problem there is in this area.

If the problem you're trying to solve is that not all of Linux is using
this Desktop directory, then get all of them to see why this is
important and get them to use this directory.

Trying to solve this problem by using an already used directory like
$HOME as your desktop by default is just going to break every other
application, will be rude to people like me, and will cause headaches to
everyone.  There are ALWAYS more dirs and files in your $HOME dir than
you want there to be, and I don't need my desktop to be cluttered with
icons I don't need in daily usage.

Getting apps that now use $HOME as their litterbox will be relatively
easy to get to use $HOME/Desktop, and it will solve every problem,
especially since Desktop is under $HOME and not the other way around.

Doing the reverse, and moving everything from Desktop to $HOME, will
make things a lot harder.

I had a good analogy in my head but I forgot, sorry :)

Thomas



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