Re: Nautilus vs gnome-shell and the future

[Cosimo Cecchi <cosimoc gnome org>]

On Fri, 2009-12-04 at 10:28 +0100, Alexander Larsson wrote:

> As a start, here is what the gnome-shell design docs say on the desktop:

[cut]

Right, I already read that paragraph, and I do not completely agree with
it. IRL, the top of my desk is as messy as my desktop, I'm fine with it,
and I know many people who have even more mess on it, and are fine with
it too ;)
I don't want to say that confusion should be a goal, but different
people develop different mental patterns when it comes to look for
things, and I think the desktop is a perfectly flexible space for this. 

Removing the ease to save files on the desktop seems a bit to me like
forcing a pattern to people, and a waste of incredibly useful space
(unless we are going to reintroduce something like Piles, but I'll
comment on that later on).
Sure, we could do a lot better than we do now for people who want their
desktop to be tidy (ensure we never overlap icons would be a good
start :)), but these are just implementation bugs IMO.

> Yes, its quick to reach, but so is the activities overview (press the
> windows key or move the mouse to the top-left corner. It all depends on
> why you want to reach the desktop. If its for something like launching
> an app/location then doing that via the activities overview is as
> efficient as the desktop (and its an advantage imho to only have one
> consistent way to do this). So, this argument is only valid if you're
> doing something you can't do on the activities overview.

I agree with you for the application case (though I'd like even more a
gnome-do-like launcher). I'm not so sure about opening documents. Recent
files and files that are currently being saved on the desktop might
conceptually overlap, but they do not always do. So, unless we're going
to have a storage-like place in the overview (which IMO brings to a
problem, see some next paragraph), this is a big change in the
interaction model. 

> It is very big, but its often covered and its limited in space (and thus
> doesn't scale). Its also problematic in that its fixed size changes when
> the resolution changes meaning you might "lose" files when that
> happens. 
> 
> The main advantage to the desktop is really that its a logical default
> storage location for starting something and for temporary things that is
> easy to reach. If we remove the desktop the likely place that things
> like this would be done is the home directory, but thats not as nice as
> its full of stuff thats always there, so you can't easily clean it up or
> get an overview of only the stuff you've temporarily created.

Yes, I agree.

> Ideally it should be as easy to reach these with gnome-shell as the
> desktop, and if its not we should instead fix it. Using the activities
> overview its pretty easy to reach a mounted volume as they are listed on
> the left. 

I think this brings up another issue: considering that most of the space
in the activities overview is taken by the workspaces view, we have to
deal with a limited free room there. On my Thinkpad X60, which has a
1024x768 resolution, the activities view looks quite crowded, and we
have to carefully consider which things are worth to put in there.
Having recent documents + applications + search + volumes + a file
storage place seems too much to me. You could smartly hide/expand some
items, but this implies more clicks for the user to reach a target. The
desktop as it is now, instead, seems to nicely fit the purpose of
showing volumes and working files.

This could be an issue in netbooks as well, where a 1024x600 screen
resolution seems to be standard. 

> However, for the case of a newly mounted volume we should probably
> integrate with the shell notification system so that plugging in a cd
> will show you some notification that this is now availible, letting you
> quickly click on it to open the mounted location.

Agreed. This is orthogonal to the desktop though IMHO.

> I'm always worried about adding non-file things to the nautilus views. A
> lot of people has historically used gnome-vfs modules + nautilus to
> create "lists" of things (fonts, themes and whatnot). This is almost
> always a bad idea. All of the nautilus UI is specialized at showing
> files and their properties. And the operations available on items expect
> them to generally act like normal files. Adding other types of objects
> always leads to strange behaviour due to this. (Not to mention that a
> custom list dialog could contain the special features needed to make
> listing the new type of object better.)
> 
> Additionally I think its kinda unexpected to open the file management
> application and have its search return a preference dialog. Especially
> with the new focus on "file management" rather than being a shell.
> 
> However, it would be cool for instance to have the search results in
> gnome-shell have a link in the "files" section of the results that
> opened up a nautilus search.
> 
> It would also be nice if the search result picked up things like custom
> icons and emblems from nautilus. And if the files had context menus with
> things like "open with other...", and "show in file manager" operations.

I agree with you here.

> What do you think of my proposal about piles?

I'm not a big fan of auto-hiding/sliding interfaces, and there's already
a near hot corner :)
I'd rather either see them on the desktop itself, like a small file
view, or in another keystroke-triggered layer over the applications, so
you can easily DnD to/from them. Also, I have to think more about it,
but we could associate them with a name and make it real folders on the
filesystem (with symlinks?), under ~/Desktop, with a default one which
is ~/Desktop itself. 

> > By the way, if we're going to stop drawing the desktop, what would be
> > drawn on it and who would be responsible for that?
> 
> If nautilus just stops this then the default will be for
> gnome-settings-daemon to set the desktop background and for X to render
> it. However, if gnome-shell instead managed it we could do nice things
> like having different backgrounds for different workspaces.

I think I did not make myself understood with my last question: what
would be on the desktop after Nautilus stops drawing it? Would it just
be empty?
By the way, there's a patchset for libgnome/Nautilus to handle different
backgrounds right now :)

Cheers,

Cosimo