Re: Major change in desktop handling

[Dave Camp <dave ximian com>]

Here's my objection to $HOME-as-the-desktop:

Nautilus' desktop should be a user-managed space.  System-managed files
do not belong on the desktop, even if they are hidden.

$HOME is the root of the user's writable filesystem.  All files owned by
the user must be placed somewhere in $HOME (except for special cases
like tmp files) - there's just nowhere else to put them.

So if you use $HOME as the desktop, you are forcing system-managed files
to be on the desktop (even if they are hidden by default).  This doesn't
make any sense - if a user turns on 'Show Hidden Files', they don't want
their desktop cluttered with a bunch of system-managed files.

.gnome-desktop was a pain to use as a document directory, because file
selectors defaulted to $HOME, and you couldn't get to ~/.gnome-desktop
without knowing where to go and typing it in.  Using ~/Desktop improves
that.  Making file selectors default to ~/Desktop will improve it
further, in keeping with the idea of the desktop as a place for
user-managed files.

-dave

On Thu, 2003-05-15 at 19:11, MArk Finlay wrote:
> If were going to have this argument then I think that now is as
> good a time as any. One thing we don't want to do is to migrate to
> ~/Desktop and then to ~/