Re: Location of Desktop Preferences menu (was Reducing the number of special uris in gnome)

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

"James M. Cape" <jcape ignore-your tv> writes: 
> I think "Desktop" is better than "Actions", but "GNOME" is better still.
> For most users, and in other places in the UI, "Desktop" refers to the
> desktop/root window: in the default case, nautilus icons. It also
> promotes a cleaner ideological separation between GNOME & the
> applications which use/require GNOME. GNOME2 vs. GNOME2 applications,
> etc.
> 

We've been doing our very best to bury references to "GNOME", compare
1.x to 2.0 in this respect. With I think good reason.  You can't
really explain to a user what "GNOME" is, and they are plenty confused
about it. I've had to explain it to journalists who've _used_
GNOME/KDE quite a bit, and still don't really get it.  GNOME is mostly
defined by things a certain developer community happens to work on,
not by any real user-interesting line.

So e.g. we've been doing s/GNOME Control Center/Preferences/, 
s/GNOME Calculator/Calculator/

Imagine this:

 Microsoft Calculator 
 Microsoft Control Center
 Microsoft Text Editor

it's just noise... it's a _calculator_, who cares what project shipped
it...

The right place to say "GNOME" is in about dialogs and such.

The relevant end user concept is "the computer" or _possibly_ "the
operating system"; just as they don't care that the WM is a separate
process, they don't care that some essentially random (to them) subset
of controls on their screen came from the GNOME project.

Actions isn't great but it works fine. Applications aren't really
actions, so in its context Actions does distinguish the things in that
menu from the things in the only other menu on the bar. You don't need
to understand any diffuse implementation concepts like "GNOME" and
"desktop" to figure out what Actions might mean.

If the problem is that Preferences aren't Applications, why not just 
add another menu:

   Applications   Preferences   Actions

Or create a "preferences application" ("nautilus preferences:///") and
just have a single menu item for that under applications, instead of
the prefs menu. Or it's possible that what we have now is good enough.
I'm not sure people are going to be pedantic about how the prefs
dialogs aren't technically applications.

Havoc