Re: volumes mark 2

[Julien Olivier <julo altern org>]

(snip)

> When discussing this someone always brings up the desktop-is-home
> setting now available as a hidden setting. In some ways this is a very
> nice setup. However, in practice there are various issues that make
> this not really possible to use by default. (Some people disagree with
> me, but lets not have that old discussion again.)
> 
> I'd like to propose we use a model that Dave calls desktop-as-home. In
> this model all the files the user normally handles (written documents,
> downloaded files, etc) are stored inside the desktop (typically in
> subdirectories reachable directly from the desktop), much as if the
> desktop were the actual homedir.
> 
> There would be no home icon on the desktop, and the file selector and
> other things should default to the Desktop for loading and saving
> files. (Technically this is easily accomplished by starting apps with
> ~/Desktop as the current working directory.)
> 

I'm all for it !

> Also on the desktop, as before, is trash, mounted removable media,
> plugged in hardware (mp3 players, cameras etc) and links to connected
> servers. I'm not sure whether we want a "Computer" link on the
> desktop, but I think not. Its not a commonly used thing, since all the
> mounted volumes are already reachable from the desktop.
> 

Just a question: what have you finally decided about floppies ? Will
there be an icon for them on the desktop even if not mounted or will
there only be an icon for them in "computer" ? If there is only an icon
for it in "computer", it could be a good idea to have "computer" on the
desktop because it could be _very_ difficult for a newbie to figure out
how to access his floppy...

> Places like home, computer and network are easily reached from menus
> in the nautilus window and the panels. I'd also like to re-introduce
> the favorites system as a way to quickly reach commonly used
> places. Favorites is more important in a spatial system, since deep
> navigation is more work.
> 

>From the UI point of view, where would the "favorites" be located ?

> This setup completely avoids the desktop <-> home loop, and avoids the
> problem of desktop-is-home, while still giving you most of the benefits.
> 

And that's great IMO.

> Note: If you're an old grey-beard like me you can easily drag a
> home-link to the desktop, or drag a navigation-window launcher to the
> panel. What we're trying to set up here is a default way for causal
> users to handle the system in a productive and non-confusing way.
> 
> Since the desktop is the default place for user files now people are
> gonna have to structure it a bit better, using directories. New users
> might not immediately figure this out, so it would be nice if we could
> create a few directories by default. Say "Documents", "Photos" and
> "Music". These could then be used as default start locations for
> specific apps, allowing users to structure their files
> "automatically".
> 
> The hard part about such directories like this is that they need to be
> translated, and the apps using them need to find them, but the apps
> may be running in different locales etc. Furthermore, it would be nice
> if the directories could be renamed and things would still work. One
> way this could be done is to place a ".docdir" file in
> ~/Desktop/Documents, and look for that when locating the
> directory. This is pretty fast to locate the few times you need it,
> and the result is easy to cache (you just need one stat to validate
> the cache). This even allows you to rename the directory if you
> want. (And if the ~/Desktop/*/.docdir is not found we'll use ~/Desktop
> as the default instead.)
> 

What happens if someone moves his "Documents" folder from ~/Desktop to
~/Desktop/foo ? The "Documents" folder would still have the .docdir file
but will Nautilus recursively look for this file ? I guess not.. But
maybe FAM could help there (disclaimer: I don't know what I'm talking
about) ?