Symbolic Folders - Icons for a better experience

[Frederik Nnaji <frederik nnaji gmail com>]

here's 2 mockups of how a properly organized filesystem can look.
perhaps i should have left the labels on the items in the first mockup, since the icons i chose are not quite optimal...

I don't see an immediate problem of having a hierarchical filesystem exposed onto the user, it's the chaotic way linux lays down it's system folders, unfriendly (i.e. not human-readable) and totally archaic in naming.

As old as this problem might be, its solutions are perhaps even older:
we can use symlinks and .hidden as suggested before, gvfs, which i can't say much about, seems to be a useful layer of software above all these geeky system folders, too, all these tools are available to design an appearance of what currently is unacceptable for presentation to the user.

Simply hiding the entire root filesystem is not a solution of scale.

I would personally love to see purposeful folders when i look at the filesystem.

/var/log doesn't mean anything to me, if i look at it in Nautilus. Give it a phracking thumbnail, some stock icon that works with a "logging" metaphor, we want this!

/usr/bin , /usr/share/, whatever, what have you, you name it, the way the system folders are organized in linux is perhaps something many people have learnt to accept, but it is far from usable. Lets think about putting a shell over these things, before escape from this chaos into a flat filesystem immediately.. i think we still have some advantages to benefit from, if we only clean up, label, mask and sort (hide) the hierarchical FS we currently have.

anybody?

Attachment: symbolic folders.png
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Attachment: symbolic folders - root.png
Description: PNG image