Re: [Usability] Content Separation in GNOME

[Daniel Borgmann <spark-mailinglists web de>]

On Tue, 2005-04-05 at 17:00 +1200, Matthew Thomas wrote:
> True, but then you have the problem that there's no good name for
> "everything except settings". (I'm guessing this is just as true in
> other languages as it is in English.) "Content" is used by Web
> programmers and media executives, but by few other people. And
> "Documents" has the problem mentioned by Rodney Dawes: people don't
> generally consider music, video, saved games, etc to be "documents".
> (Mac OS Classic used "Documents" to cover all of those, but only as a
> suggestion, and perhaps because documents *were* the the only things in
> that folder in the mid-1980s. In Mac OS X, "Music", "Pictures" and so on
> are alongside "Documents", not inside it.)

I do believe the term we are looking for is "Desktop". That's what the
desktop should be used and reserved for, not stupid advertising and
launchers. If it wouldn't be for legacy apps hardcoding $HOME (instead
of using the current working directory, which would probably allow us to
fix it), I'd even suggest to remove any trace of $HOME from the GUI and
leave it entirely for the user's applications and CLI users. This would
in fact result into the same behavior as "$HOME as desktop", just from a
different direction.
I think that enforcing folders below Desktop is bad, because the user
should be able to keep her documents as near or far as she likes.
Enforcing the user to put stuff ABOVE the Desktop level would be even
worse.

-- 
Daniel Borgmann <daniel borgmann gmail com>