Re: Desktops: a post-2.4 suggestion.

[Daniel Borgmann <spark-mailinglists web de>]

On Sun, 2003-05-18 at 02:25, Callum McKenzie wrote:
> b) $HOME is where all the users files go. Thats the way the system is
>    designed. We can't change it. 

Isn't this wrong? Or I just don't understand what "all the files" is
supposed to mean. If I understand it correctly, there are exactly two
kinds of files:
a) Files which are created by the user, for example by saving a text
document or by downloading a file from the internet.
b) Data which is created by an application. Either to store internal
data (BUG, should be hidden) or to make data available to the user
(bug?).

a) can be solved nicely by defaulting our fileselector to Desktop. As
for "legacy" fileselectors, someone mentioned that simply changing the
directory to Desktop before starting GNOME would solve this. Maybe there
are some fundamental problems with this, but if it works, wouldn't it be
good enough? Especially KDE fileselectors work nicely with this (I
tried).

As for b), I don't really buy that it's always a bug. For example Quake3
saves screenshots in $HOME/.quake3/screenshots, which is obviously
crack. This is just one example why it can't always be a bug if the
application saves visible data in the user's directory (in a subfolder
of course). But if this is a bug in some people's eyes, then it can't be
a problem that those folders are not shown on your desktop. And if it's
not a bug, then it's still much less intrusive if the application
doesn't put the files on the user's desktop automatically (wouldn't be
possible with $HOME as desktop).

So why can't we just make Desktop the folder "where all the users files
go" and why wouldn't that be sufficient? 

To summarize:
- Removing the home icon from the desktop
- Defaulting the file selector to Desktop
- Changing working directory of GNOME to ~/Desktop for fileselectors
defaulting to pwd
- Changing all "Home" to "Desktop" or something else (link in the
applications menu, Nautilus "Home" button, etc)
- Rooting Nautilus at ~/Desktop (could even remove the visible
/home/user/Desktop path once Nautilus goes multi-root, so there can be
alternative roots for $HOME and / for advanced users)

Would't this have _exactly_ the same user visible effect as $HOME as
desktop without all the issues and fights?


Daniel