[Nautilus-list] Constructive Criticism Revisted

[James Mitchell Allmond <gte203h prism gatech edu>]

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Nonsense. If there's one thing I really do dislike about the current
system, it's having to trace the CDROM and floppy down in the bowels
of /mnt (okay, they're not *that* far down, but when you have to climb
all the way up from your home directory, it's a nuisance). And I haven't
been using Linux so long I've forgotten the days of "where the hell is
this stuff mounted, anyway?"

Which, of course, is why we have automounting and auto-creation of
desktop icons (which is a little buggy -- sorry I can't reproduce the
one I'm thinking of, guys, or I'd file it -- and may not be to
everyone's taste, but it works).

And one thing novice users *shouldn't* have to know about is what 
physical drives are in their machine and what's on which physical
drive -- the nastiest 20th-century legacy of Windows, IMHO, is the
way it still thinks in terms of drive letters.

Anyway, my real point was that while I want quick access to the floppy
and CDROM *when I need to use them*, most of the time I don't, and 
I'd rather save the screen real estate for other things.
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It has nothing to do with you use the most. It has to do with good book
keeping and being clear. It's about partitioning a topic into it's core
subtopics. A user doesn't spend much time clicking between "My summary"
and "inbox" in evolution either but yet they are there taking up most of
the real estate. Why? Cause it breaks Evolution into the key components
of what it's for. What's a file browser for? It's for moving between
different data storage devices and manipulating or viewing their
contents. At the heart of the whole purpose is the individual
components. When a author writes a book, does he let the reader use the
index as the primary source for organizing the material and as the means
of navigation? No, he breaks it into it's fundamental sections and
labels those in the outline. The index is just a extra tool for
specifics. These "Places" Icons are the exact same thing.