Re: $HOME as desktop

[Darryl Rees <rees netnam vn>]

Owen Taylor wrote:

>    dcc - xchat is broken
>    evolution - evolution is broken
>    nsmail - Netscape 4 was broken several years ago
>    GNUstep - wmaker was broken when I tried to
>              reproduce a bug yesterday
>    Mail - various traditionally unixy things are broken
>    News - Gnus is broken
>    Desktop - KDE is broken
>
>   You get the picture. If we made $HOME the desktop   
>   we force the user to choose between having useless
>   cruft on their desktop and not using other software.
>  
You've been pretty exhaustive there and you've only come up with 7 
examples, realistically its likely to be one or two for most long-term 
users. Evolution is changing. KDE is configurable.

The argument seems to be it's alright to have a ton of crap in your home 
directory that you use from shell, but not on your desktop. It's shell 
centric view of the world.

> - Quality user experience depends on consistency;
>   not just within GNOME, but for all apps. How 
>   are Mozilla, and OpenOffice.org, and the 
>   Java file selector, and ... going to get the
>   behavior right if GNOME uses ~ and KDE uses Desktop/ ?
>   
Mozilla, openoffice, java-file selector all use Home. They will have to 
add a Desktop in future if that's what we standardize on - giving a 
users a choice they don't really need to make.

BTW, having supported a lot of MSWin users I know they 'lose' documents 
all the time, and accept it as part of working with computers.  
End-users feel they don't 'understand' where their files go, and 
where/what the desktop is. I just feel where going down the same path to 
some extent.

> Perhaps using $HOME is logically right, but practically
> speaking I can't see how it is even a possibility at
> all. We need to use ~/Desktop, and we need to spend our
> ingenuity in making that seem as consistent and robust
> as possible.
>
> Regards,
>                                     Owen
>  
Sorry, I'm still convinced $HOME is a better long-term solution, even if 
~/Desktop is the short-term path of least resistance.

Regards,
Long.