Re: Win95 users vs. Gnome users - a rant (was Re: Possible gmc bug?)

[Paul G Cooper <pgc maths warwick ac uk>]

On Thu, 15 Apr 1999, Michael Rogers wrote:

[snip]
> >When I first showed gnome to someone used to another operating system
> >(this was back at the 0.30 stage) one of the first things they said 
> >was where is my C: drive and my A: drive. (OK so this is a vulgar 
> >DOSism but its so embedded into the average users psyche you have to 
> >account for it)
> 
>  I don't think Gnome should pander to Win95 users by making the 
> interface "easy to learn for the average newbie coming from Win95". 
> "Easy to learn" is enough. Hopefully in the near future some users 
> will come to Gnome as their first experience of computers. It would 
> be a shame if they found it imitating Windows.
> 
>  There are good points about the Win95 interface, but some of them 
> (like the C: drive existing within "My Computer", which exists within 
> "Desktop", which exists within "C:\WINDOWS\DESKTOP", which exists 
> within the C: drive...) are confusing and stupid. Personally I prefer 
> the Unix method of having a unified filesystem which starts at /. 
> This may also be a lie for the sake of convenience, but at least it's 
> a consistent one.

That's not what I said and not where my gnome inductee was coming from
either - they used DOS/win3.11, thats where the C: drive, A: drive
instinct comes from. The win95 loop you described confuses 3.11 users at
first. What I was trying to point out (badly perhaps) is look how far
gnome has come - when I show the latest gnome to people the floppy. cdrom,
etc are right there and easy to use. But....

> >Also one of the hard things for newbies to learn is the filesystem,
> >mounting, unmounting, etc. Now that is almost history with the 
> >newest gmc - right there on the desktop is a floppy disk icon (for 
> >example), and I can just double click right into it. However when I 
> >go to save stuff in gnumeric (for example) I have to go hunting for 
> >where the floppy is mounted - ok so usually it's in /mnt/floppy but 
> >it might not be mounted, and a newbie isn't necessarily going to 
> >know where to look.
> 
>  They will have to learn some time, because sooner or later every 
> user will need to use either the command line or a non-Gnome 
> application. I'm in favour of attracting new users to Gnome by making 
> it user-friendly, but I believe that if you put too many layers of 
> nice, considerate front end between the user and what's really going 
> on, you ultimately confuse them when they try move beyond the basic 
> day-to-day point and click operations. Instead of dumbing the user 
> interface down, provide documentation to let the new user know what's 
> actually going on. Let them learn something, it won't kill them.

I agree theres a (fine?) line between making things easy and treating
users like idiots. 

> >So my idea is this; would it be possible to put a <Desktop> entry in 
> >the drop down path menu of the open/save dialog then it would be 
> >easy to find the floppy, zip, etc (this isn't original I just copied 
> >this from the mac - anyone who didn't know that go to the back of 
> >the class). 
> 
> (Oops - going to the back of the class.)
> 
> This is a trivial problem. On my system it's easy to find the floppy 
> because it's mounted at /floppy. The cdrom is mounted at /cdrom. You 
> don't need to change the file dialog, just mount your devices in an 
> intuitive place.

Yes, on YOUR system (and on mine too) but stock RH behaviour puts it in
/mnt/floppy and who know knows where other (possibly shared) devices on
other systems like solaris, etc, might be put.

> >A variation on this would be to have the desktop, floppy, cdrom, 
> >zip, etc appear in the drop down path menu - this is win95ish I 
> >guess so I have my flamesuit ready.
> 
>  I don't care if it's Win95ish if it works! However, I don't think 
> this feature would be a good idea. It imitates one of the worst 
> features of Windows - giving the user the impression that the root of 
> the filesystem is the desktop, and that their filesystem exists 
> within the desktop rather than the other way around. They should 
> realise that the icons on their desktop are only links to files or 
> devices which exist elsewhere.

I don't know I could be wrong but I get the impression the the sysops here
would rather we thought the desktop (well our home directory at least) is
the root of the filesystem and that we don't go messing around any lower
than that, but then we might have the BOFH ;-)

>  Another problem is that files in the desktop directory would have to 
> be automatically "dereferenced" by the file selector widget (so that 
> the floppy drive and not the link to the floppy drive would appear in 
> the file list). What happens when you want to do something to the 
> link instead of to the floppy? You can't find it in your file 
> selector.

Huh? All I want is an entry in the drop down menu that slaps me in the
.gnome-desktop directory and lets me follow the
fd0/cdrom/My_Latest_project/etc links wherever they may go - like like if 
I did 
 
cd .gnome-desktop/fd0

on the command line. I should get round to learning C so I can code it in
myself ;-/

Your argument has peruseded more against my idea than I was previously but
I'm still lazy enough to like it ;-)

Paul