Re: Nautilus vs gnome-shell and the future

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Fri, 2009-12-04 at 18:35 +0100, Cosimo Cecchi wrote:
> On Fri, 2009-12-04 at 10:28 +0100, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> Removing the ease to save files on the desktop seems a bit to me like
> forcing a pattern to people, and a waste of incredibly useful space
> (unless we are going to reintroduce something like Piles, but I'll
> comment on that later on).
> Sure, we could do a lot better than we do now for people who want
> their
> desktop to be tidy (ensure we never overlap icons would be a good
> start :)), but these are just implementation bugs IMO.

Yeah, trying to figure out ways to replace the features of the desktop
is hard. The piles feature while cool doesn't solve the imho most
important aspect of being a default storage locations for new/active
files. So, I'm more and more disagreeing with removing the desktop from
being handled by the file manager.

Of course, we should probably still think of ways we can change it to
work better in the gnome-shell world. For instance, maybe it would be
nice to be able to show different desktop contents on different
workspaces? This would match with using workspaces as a way to manage
separate "activities". Of course, that would be sort of problematic when
you're accessing the desktop directory from e.g. the file selector.

> > Ideally it should be as easy to reach these with gnome-shell as the
> > desktop, and if its not we should instead fix it. Using the
> activities
> > overview its pretty easy to reach a mounted volume as they are
> listed on
> > the left. 
> 
> I think this brings up another issue: considering that most of the
> space
> in the activities overview is taken by the workspaces view, we have to
> deal with a limited free room there. On my Thinkpad X60, which has a
> 1024x768 resolution, the activities view looks quite crowded, and we
> have to carefully consider which things are worth to put in there.
> Having recent documents + applications + search + volumes + a file
> storage place seems too much to me. You could smartly hide/expand some
> items, but this implies more clicks for the user to reach a target.
> The
> desktop as it is now, instead, seems to nicely fit the purpose of
> showing volumes and working files.

Yeah, the activities overview as it stands right now obviously focuses
on managing running applications. File handling is sort of included but
clearly a secondary feature.


> > What do you think of my proposal about piles?
> 
> I'm not a big fan of auto-hiding/sliding interfaces, and there's
> already a near hot corner :)

Yeah, but always-visible screen space is very valuable, and shouldn't be
wasted on thing you're not using that often. auto-hiding is the obvious
way around this, but as you say its already used for somethings and its
getting crowded. Its interesting to think of what other possible
solutions there are to the desktop features though.

> I'd rather either see them on the desktop itself, like a small file
> view, or in another keystroke-triggered layer over the applications,
> so you can easily DnD to/from them. Also, I have to think more about it,
> but we could associate them with a name and make it real folders on
> the filesystem (with symlinks?), under ~/Desktop, with a default one which
> is ~/Desktop itself. 

Real folders is how OSX implement the stacks in the dock. Its possible
but limits it to files and the other disadvantages i listed in my other
mail.

> > If nautilus just stops this then the default will be for
> > gnome-settings-daemon to set the desktop background and for X to
> render
> > it. However, if gnome-shell instead managed it we could do nice
> things
> > like having different backgrounds for different workspaces.
> 
> I think I did not make myself understood with my last question: what
> would be on the desktop after Nautilus stops drawing it? Would it just
> be empty?

I don't think there are any proposals for this atm, so my guess is
empty. Another possibility would be "gadgets" but it seems gnome-shell
has decided to put these in a sidebar, so that seems unlikely.

> By the way, there's a patchset for libgnome/Nautilus to handle
> different backgrounds right now :)

Its kinda hard to solve this in a correct fashion though. What you can
do is monitor the current active workspace and change the background
when it changes. However, that doesn't really work well in e.g. the
gnome-shell activities overview because you'll get N_WORKSPACES x the
currrent background.

A more correct solution would be to integrate tighter with the window
manager and have one desktop window per workspace.

-- 
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
       alexl redhat com            alexander larsson gmail com 
He's an unconventional shark-wrestling firefighter on his last day in the job. 
She's a cynical winged single mother with an MBA from Harvard. They fight 
crime!