Re: [Usability] A (rather long) list of GNOME usability issues

[Christoph Wolk <spikespiegel gmx de>]

Hi, 

I'm the original author of that list.

>>dot-files, wants a tidier home directory even when hidden files are 
>>shown
>  not a problem high priority problem in my personal opinion but maybe
>  others will think it is worth tackling (but my bet is on people
>  impolitely suggesting he leave hidden files hidden).  I'm not even going
>  to start on people using their Home directory as their desktop and then
>  complaining about it.

Thanks, but home as desktop works just fine for me. It means I only
have to clean up one instead of two :)

And having ~/ cleaned up even with hidden files shown is only part of
the problem; I think there are good arguments for having data,
configuration and temporary/cache files separated. One of them is easier
backup, if I know all my mails, tomboy notes etc are on one folder, I
can just copy that somewhere; if I don't I have to manually inspect
every folder if I only want to backup my data. The other is that -
unfortunately - sometimes configuration files break, and it would be
nice to have them separated so I don't accidentally delete my data.

This is a minor "would be nice to have" goal, imho.

>>improve discoverability of Nautilus backgrounds and emblems
>  file a request against nautilus I guess

It's on my to do list. I included this after stumbling upon the feature
after thinking for about a year that it wasn't there. It would also be
nice to have, say, recursively setting a background for a folder and
it's subfolders, so all directories under ~/Music have a different
background, to further improve the differences each spatial window has.

Again, a minor feature. But I did state at the beginning that I'm
nitpicking on some of the problems.

> Personally I've toyed with the idea of hiding everything below
> home and then giving users an easier view of the file system (what
> they are entitled to see) rooted at ~ for example
> ~/Applications/
> but everyone seems to have ideas of their own on this and then there are
> the people using their home directory as their desktop complicating
> matters.

What does home as desktop to do with this? Anyway, hiding everything
under ~/ is an idea, but I think this is a big difference from what we
currently have. Gnome should become as easy as possible, but it should
still remain a unix desktop, and some unix users will want or have to see
everything under / .

>These lists are a good start but it would be a big help if this guy could
>follow up on his suggestions and file a shedload of bug reports and
>feature requests and then try to identify if any of these issue are
>already under consideration.

This is exactly what I'm planning to do. When O got that far writing
these (kind of happened after collecting them for a while, but still
was a lot of work) I wanted to get some impressions from other users
whether the ideas make sense, if they have other ideas or arguments
against mine, basically to refine my ideas before I go and annoy
developers. Bugzilla is quite large and not easy to search, and
there's little point in filing duplicates.

There are actually more issues in the list than you summarized here, I
can post the complete list if someone wants that. It's quite large
though.

I switch to Christians post now, sorry for the unusual reply but I
didn't get the original mails yet.

>No, no, no! :). We've changed the behavior multiple times forth and back
>in the past because people are never satisfied. The conclusion was that
>symlinks are more or less handled transparently on your shell as well.
>ln -s foo bar && cd bar/ pretends that bar is a hierarchy on its own,
>and that's what I think the symlinks are supposed to do. If you want
>shortcuts, use the "Create Launcher..." functionality (for now only
>available on the desktop :/)

I can understand that. Maybe create Launcher should be a little more
self-explanatory? I had trouble when I tried adding a Launcher for a
folder, that was Gnome 2.8 though. Also, a Launcher would not be useful
from the command line, and programs wouldn't follow the link. But you
can't have everything :)

>I'm interested in whether you want a
>global undo (for all windows), or whether each window undo history
>should be treated separately. What if you close a window? One can make
>this arbitrarily complex by storing the undo history of a window inside
>the metadata system, but I doubt it's worth the pain for everyday use.
>"Ooops, I didn't want to rename that" might be the most common use-case.

I think global undo should be enough; usually people realize their
errors in a file manager quite fast (I think ^^;). Closing a window...
hm didn't think about that yet. Generally, when you close a window the
undo data is lost, so this could be the same for nautilus. Then again,
with spatial closing windows is quite a common task and probably
automated (as far as possible). Have to think about that.

And yes, the things that are probably most important are "ooops, i
removed the filename" and "ooops, i hit move to trash with a lot of
folders open".

Christian, Alan, thank you for your replies (and of course your work
on this great desktop environment). They were very interesting to read,
and gave me lots to think about.

Wolki