Re: [Nautilus-list] re: Desktop folder (again)

[David Moles <david moles vykor com>]

On Sat, 2002-03-30 at 02:14, Ben Ford wrote:
> David Moles wrote:
> 
> >The Mac has had this for over a
> >decade and it blows my mind that no other OS seems to have figured that
> >out. (And now with Mac OS X even the Mac doesn't have it any more. I
> >won't get into that.)
> >
> 
> Maybe there is a reason why  . . . .

Yeah, 'cause Steve Jobs is a punk. :)

HHOS. From what I can tell, and from what the usability experts on the
web seem to be saying, there's very little in the changes from OS 9 to
OS X that's actually based on usability principles rather than "Steve
thinks it looks cool".
 
> >That being the case, *whatever* actual directory the desktop displays
> >the contents of suddenly becomes an important place *in the filesystem*,
> >regardless of whether you're accessing it through Nautilus, or from the
> >shell, or from some other GNOME application, or from some text-mode
> >legacy application. If that directory is buried in some hard-to-find
> >place -- ~/.desktop, ~/.gnome-desktop, ~/.gnome/Desktop, etc. are all 
> >sufficiently hard to find as far as I'm concerned, and ~/Desktop isn't
> >much better -- then any files in that directory become unneccessarily
> >difficult to access.
> >
> 
> But you think that it is perfectly reasonable to instruct me to save my 
> Finances.gnucash file (or any other document that I keep in $HOME) in an 
> arbitrary subdirectory which is "buried in a hard to find place", IE, I 
> can't just type 'cd' to get to it?

If Gnucash is far and away the worst culprit for cluttering up your
desktop, then yes, I do. Why are you manipulating Finances.gnucash from
the shell in the first place? Is there anything useful you can do with
it? I would assume that most of the time you just launch Gnucash and
it opens your last saved document by default.

What I don't understand is why you think an inconsistency between ease
of access from the shell and ease of access from the GUI is a good 
thing.

> If ~/Desktop is unacceptable to you, what makes you think that 
> ~/Documents would be acceptable to me?

The fact that I've tried both and found out that this way works better
for me. And I was initially resistant to the idea as well. Try it for
a while with an open mind and then come back.
 
> And another thing that I have noticed here a lot.  Calling something a 
> legacy app doesn't make it go away and it in no way makes what you are 
> creating superior to it.  People have been doing things a certain way 
> since long before many of us were even born.  What makes you think they 
> are all going to obligingly change their ways of working because you 
> decide on it?

Actually, the GNOME project has done a pretty decent job of either
getting legacy applications to change their behavior or replacing
them with new, well-behaved applications, so far. If we're just
going to say "The UNIX Way is for applications to be inconsistent
and sucky", we might as well all give up and go home.

--D