Re: $HOME as desktop

[Gaute Lindkvist <lindkvis stud ntnu no>]

I also hate to join this discussion but people here seem to assume that if
$HOME is desktop, then people "will have to" keep it clean.

This is totally untrue. I know loads of people, that have the messiest
desktops imaginable on the Windows platform.

If we made $HOME the desktop standard, these people will still have the
messiest desktops available, but now they have trouble finding ALL of
their files, and not just the relatively unimportant "launchers" that can
be found on a menu anyway.

This is made worse by:
1. The desktop has far less functionality than any normal Nautilus window,
and having to open $HOME in a separate desktop window just to work with
those files is counter-intuitive. It would also put us firmly and
unmovably in the navigation metaphor, which I suspect is not really what
some of the people arguing for $HOME wants.
2. The desktop has limited space. Yes, you all know what to do about that,
you create sub-directories right? Well, a huge percentage of users just
dump everything in one directory. I personally have a very fine directory
structure carefully laid out, my girlfriend has Documents, Downloads,
Images, but these are all empty, and all the files are in the
$HOME-directory. Some people might just feel like they have to delete
files to clean up the desktop.

Gaute


On Sat, 17 May 2003, Darryl Rees wrote:

> 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.
>
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