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

[David Moles <david moles vykor com>]

On Wed, 2002-04-03 at 07:49, Ben Ford wrote:
> David Moles wrote:
> 
>  >On Sat, 2002-03-30 at 02:14, Ben Ford wrote:
>  >
>  >>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.
>  >
> 
> Who said I manipulated Finances.gnucash from the shell?  As I stated, I
> simply saved the file in the default location.  And again, as stated
> before, the average user would do the same, and in your $HOME == Desktop
> scenario, be quite flustered at the 50+ files that for some unknown
> reason accumulate on the desktop.

You implied that moving Finances.gnucash to a Documents folder would
be unacceptable to you because you couldn't just type "cd" and be in
the folder with Finances.gnucash in it. That sounds like the shell to
me.

> So, because it works for you, it *has* to work for me.  This is a matter
> of preference here.  The whole idea behind Open Source / Free Software /
> Whatever-you-want-to-call-it is freedom of choice.  I (and many many
> others) completely abandoned the wares of a certain company because they
> imposed their ideas on me.  Don't think that I (and many many others)
> won't do it again.

That's not what I said. I said because it works for me I *think* it
will work for you. If you've given both a fair try and you're convinced
it doesn't, that's one thing. If you haven't even given it a fair try,
then I think you should try it first before declaring it doesn't work.

>  >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.
> 
> Well-behaved?  By your standards maybe.  But what you are trying to do
> is impose *your* ideas on the entire community.  Personally I would
> prefer to have every single dotfile in my $HOME be a non-hidden file in
> one ~/.etc/ directory.  Does that entitle me to call all your
> application "misbehaving"?

Consistency is, if not *the* most important contributor to usability
in an interface, certainly one of the most. The GNOME project is a
project to develop a more usable interface for Linux and other Unix-
like systems. One of the main reasons a new interface is needed is
rampaging inconsistency between applications. If you don't like the
fact that GNOME attempts to create consistency, you're welcome to
continue using whatever applications and whatever desktop you like.

I haven't heard anyone talk about taking away your choices. What 
I've heard is people talking about changing the defaults. If you're
happy with the current defaults but the majority of other users
aren't, that sucks for you, but that doesn't make it anyone else's
problem. You can always change your settings.

> You know, you guys sound just like Be did a few years ago.

First, don't assume I'm speaking for anyone else -- I'm sure there
are many people on this list who wouldn't appreciate being held
responsible for what I say. :)

Second, I don't see why that's a bad thing. If BeOS was open source,
I'd be using it right now.

--D