Re: $HOME as desktop

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

My thinking on the issue is....

1) From a clean slate, Desktop and Home should probably be the same
thing.

2) As part of a coherent goal for GNOME's deep interaction structures it
might be worth making $HOME be the desktop some day.

but

3) I think the usability cost of the $HOME transition *in isolation*
exceeds the benefits. Basically, I don't think its worth doing for its
own sake at this point.

-Seth

On Fri, 2003-05-16 at 13:58, Owen Taylor wrote:
> I really hesitate to jump in here, but I think it's
> worth stating clearly why $HOME as desktop isn't an 
> option:
> 
>  - Upgrades: user upgrades to Red Hat 14.7. Suddenly,
>    they have 531 files on their desktop, many of
>    which don't fit on the screen. Unless they think
>    to "clean up", some of these files may be lost
>    forever because they are way off the screen.
> 
>    I think it's unreasonable to expect users to 
>    spend a day cleaning their home directory just
>    because they switched to a new version of GNOME.
> 
>  - We don't control the other software the user
>    runs, we don't control what software they run
>    in the past; you may claim that everybody
>    should change, but that isn't realistic; looking
>    in my home directory.
> 
>     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.
> 
>  - 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/ ?
>    
> 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
>