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

["Michael Rogers" <bastard_machine hotmail com>]

>> >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.

Sorry, I didn't mean to jump down your throat just because you 
mentioned Windows!

> 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....

You're right, you did mention that this was Gnome 0.3 you were talking 
about.

>> >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.

Perhaps Gnome/GMC could set up symlinks from <desktop_dir>/floppy to 
the floppy drive's mount point, ditto <desktop_dir>/zip and whatever 
other devices it finds. That way the links would be accessible from 
outside of the Gnome desktop.

>> >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 ;-)

I suppose I was looking at things from the point of view of a home 
user. I know some sysops still think it's a security risk letting 
users mount floppies!

>>  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 ;-/

I think you could set this up with a couple of symbolic links... but 
mounting the disks would still require the user to know the real mount 
points. A couple of aliases called mount_floppy and unmount_floppy? 
I'm sure there's a better way of doing this but I don't know enough 
about Unix to guess what it is.


 - Michael Rogers

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