Re: [Usability]Abstracting the Linux desktop

["Miguel A. Arévalo" <marevalo marevalo net>]

Anders Feder wrote:

> On Wed, 2002-12-11 at 21:17, MArk Finlay wrote:
>  
>
> > That's my essay. Nothing new or particuarly origional. It was on
> > not sure if it is really usibility thought
> >    
>
> I read your excellent essay when it was posted on Footnotes some time
> ago, recognizing many of the needs you described; the first question I
> got from my Windows-veteran friend when I introduced him to his new
> GNOME desktop was "Where is 'My Computer'?". The Unix filesystem
> certainly wasn't designed with usability in mind and even after several
> years of use I must admit that it still has me a bit alienated.
>
> In my opinion, giving the Unix filesystem a friendlier face would be a
> very natural next step for GNOME usability.
>  
Eeeeeehhh !! Wrong !!

I'm sorry but there is no worst part on the Windows 95 Desktop than this 
evil "My Computer" icon, this icon exists only because the Windows 
filesystem is ill-designed for both end and admin users. An end user 
should only know where his personal documents are stored, and "The Right 
Thing" (tm) is using the complete desktop metaphore. The end user should 
not even see there is a physical computer, because there are lots of 
configurations that breaks this paradigm (X-terminals, distributed 
filesystems, complete distributed operating systems, etc.) that will 
never fit it.

The UNIX filesystem (coupled with a good package manager, esp. dpkg & 
apt) is the best hierarchycal filesystem in use now, and it is so 
because it is very user friendly, but the end-user of the "system" part 
(binaries, libraries, etc) are the admins and system software, no end 
lusers should know the existence of /usr/lib nor /dev/hdb.

Of course, the best filesystem for both the user and admins-software 
would be an attributed filesystem, but, this is not UNIX nor POSIX so 
we'll have to wait for another 20 years.

Regards.