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

[David Moles <david moles vykor com>]

On Fri, 2002-03-29 at 15:07, Marten Payne wrote:
> > On Thu, 2002-03-28 at 23:13, Ben Ford wrote:
> > > David Bordoley wrote:
> > > Eh, no thanks.  That is what $HOME is for.
> 
> > Why? I mean, do you have a reason other than that you're used to
> > doing it that way and you like doing it that way?
> 
> It's not a question of "used to doing it that way". The desktop is not a
> "normal" folder and the secret of of its usability lies in this fact.
> People use the desktop the way they do because it more closely maps to
> the way their minds work. Making them "get used" to some other way is a
> bad idea.

I came to Unix directly from Macintosh and from Day One have done my
best to use my home directory the way I used to use my desktop. My use
of my home directory maps to the way my mind works, and so does my use
of the desktop.

I beg to differ with your assertion that it's not a question of what
one's used to. You're not used to using your home directory the way
you use your desktop, so it seems unnatural to you. I'm not asking
anyone to get used to using the desktop a different way, and I agree
that reducing the desktop to "just another folder" would take away
much of its power.

> Software should serve people, not the other way around. The
> Desktop is a two dimensional, modeless place where people can arrange
> their stuff much like they arrange piles of paper on their desk.
> Implementing it as the home directory lose this because random apps (a
> possibly infinite set) can tamper with the users spatial map without
> permission. And as has been pointed out, the issue of apps like the Java
> plugin creating files in the home directory unbidden is open ended and
> cannot be solved.

You're not taking your own argument far enough. Of course software
should serve people. Those ill-behaved apps should also serve people.
Cluttering up the home directory with extraneous garbage is not a
priori a better thing than cluttering up the desktop. Once the desktop
becomes a standard location, I will bet you any amount of money that
we face the same open-ended problem with the desktop that we already
have with the home directory.

A visual file manager should turn your *whole filesytem* into a
two-dimensional modeless place where you can arrange your stuff the way
you arrange piles of paper on your desk. 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.)

It would be one thing if the desktop worked the way it did up through
about Macintosh System 6 where the desktop was not in any way an actual
folder and no file could ever exist solely on the desktop -- the desktop
was simply a container of icons representing files in other locations.
Once it became possible to save files directly to the desktop, however,
people started doing it. Apart from a handful of super-organized people,
almost nobody I know who uses a commercial OS routinely saves things
anywhere else.

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. Furthermore, it leads to a kind of split
personality disorder where you're navigating one file hierarchy from
Nautilus and another file hierarchy from everything else.

> So please don't make it the default and if some
> developers really want it, it should be a option buried deep in the
> control panel.

Try it for a month before you decide you can't live with it. For the
question of whether it should be the default, we can all throw
anecdotes at each other forever. We need real usability testing.