Re: [Nautilus-list] Integration of gmc and nautilus desktop directories.

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

> Some of us think that it is not broken, and that your fix would annoy
> us more.  So although I agree that if we can do better than
> Windows/MacOS we should do so, but I do not believe that this is doing
> better.

I added this as a preference about a week ago to the Adavanced user
level in HEAD nautilus. Look at "Edit Preferences->Windows &
Desktop->Use your home directory as the desktop". I've been using the
Home Directory as my Desktop for about 1.5 mo now (symlinks don't work
right because of the ways .nautilus-metafile.xml works, I hardcoded it
into my local copy of Nautilus). My experience has been similar to how
Alvaro imagined his would be. I didn't use the desktop much at all until
it was my home directory. Unless you keep a clean homedir, you initially
find your desktop covered with FAR too many files. But I quickly sorted
things out and found I actually preferred my homedir that way (even from
the commandline).

Combined with file monitoring (which Darin and I added to HEAD a few
weeks ago), the Desktop as Homedir allows me to use Nautilus a *lot*
more, since I can fluidly switch between my commandline tools and files
to working on the files on the Desktop. I hardly use ls, cp, mv, tar,
anymore since its easy to just move the mouse from my terminal over to
the desktop doubleclick/drag/whatever and voila.

I think some of the disagreement here results from a schism in how
various people use/perceive the desktop. I use the desktop (on Windows
and MacOS too, though MacOS is more conducive to this) as my document
folder, not just an alternative to the panel for launcher icons. I use
my homedir the same way on the commandline. So in my case merging the
two is very natural. Anecdotally, my use of Nautilus (even as a Nautilus
developer) has increased somewhere in the neighborhood of 4x or more as
a result of this simple change.

I notice some people use the desktop as a sort of glorified application
launcher (putting lots of "launcher icons" such as Netscape, Gnumeric,
AbiWord). I suspect that having the desktop as homedir would not work
well for people preferring to use their desktop in this way. Neither way
seems notably "right" to me, though I obviously favour the document
centered environment in my own personal use. We should make GNOME a good
environment for both of these uses (mac users seem to tend to use their
desktops for documents, windows users tend to use their desktops as file
launchers, probably both based on conventions of the OS).

The other issue at hand is having random unwanted "application setting
folders" lying on the desktop if it were the homedir. On a heavily used
system with lots of applications (my own), I only have three, two of
which can be eliminated by changes to GNOME programs. The three folders
are ~/evolution, ~/Nautilus and ~/ns_imap. I used to have ~/ns_mail, but
I configured that to be ~/.ns_mail (so I suppose we'll have to count
that one as evil clutter too). 

I think a *really* cool thing would be to find a way for evolution to
actually store its mail in ~/Mail (w/o screwing up mutt, pine, etc) and
to embed pieces of evolution inside Nautilus as a Mail view! ~/Nautilus
can certainely be nixed if we so desire. The only tricky one is
~/ns_[mail|imap]. Obviously those aren't going to be changed in the 4.xx
series, but we could try to ensure that Mozilla doesn't do the same
thing since its still under active development. Other than that
applications don't tend to leave non .* droppings in ~ since commandline
users tend to object to this as well (ls isn't conducive to particularly
large numbers of files either!).

-Seth

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