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

[Evan DiBiase <evand wplug org>]

On Fri, 13 Apr 2001, Pavel Cisler wrote:

> Hmm..., I wonder why having separate home and desktop folders doesn't work on
> Linux but works great on OS X and BeOS. Guess neither are "unixish" enough,
> whatever that's supposed to mean.

I think we need to look at what, conceptually, the home and desktop
folders are. Is the goal of the desktop to provide the user with easy
access to commonly used files/features, as well as things like news
(with that nifty RSS component)? Or is it going to be the main place
where user-file interaction is going to take place?

On the other hand, the home directory is pretty much where files _must_
be placed for a user. To set up an analogy, it's like a house (hey, the
name finally makes sense). You keep most of your stuff in your house,
probably, because people aren't going to let you keep it in their
houses. And you also have subsets of the house, because keeping
everything in one space would be inefficient. One subset you have is the
desktop subset. Your house contains the desktop, but not everything in
the house is on the desktop because that would be stupid.

Now, this analogy doesn't translate directly to the current dilemma, but
I think it makes the roles a bit clearer. Where it breaks down is that
you really don't "execute" things on a real desktop like, say, a car,
but you can launch a web browser from your Nautilus desktop.

I vote for separation along the lines that it was done on the Mac. As
far as I understand, your hard drives showed up on the desktop (for our
purposes, hard drive == home directory, at least for display on the
desktop), but the desktop actually was contained within the hard drive.

This argues for a hidden desktop folder, because users who need to
change it outside of Nautilus probably know how to find . hidden files
anyway. But we could probably stick it in a user preference/level option
somewhere.

So, back to the idea -- if my concepts of what home directories and
desktops are for is accurate, I'd suggest going the Mac-like route.
Otherwise, I'd be interested in hearing other interpretations of the
current UNIX GUI model.

-Evan