On Fri, Nov 25, 2005 at 11:07:09AM +0000, Chris Green wrote:
Another thing you can do with Gnome is you can create "locations" which can point at an SSH connection/filesystem (SFTP I guess, I've never used this) and FTP server, a Windows Share, or a WebDAV folder. You can then make these locations appear in the file dialogues as an easy way to get places with a single click.
Which goes to prove what I said to some extent, this is something unique to the computer environment and constraining it to a 'desktop' just makes it more difficult to use and understand.
JOOI what do you call what most people commonly refer to as a desktop on your computer?
I don't see why you are having a rant about it as the name "Desktop" is an arbitary name that describes what most people would call the desktop, if it was called "boingboingeeeeeeek" and the developers had called what most people call the desktop "boingboingeeeeeeek" would that make you any happier?
The only reason for the existence of "Desktop" is because it represents the contents of a folder which relates to what many people call their desktop. Showing the contents of this folder is quite a powerful concept (and imho is better than not using the desktop space at all), but if you don't want to use the folder then don't, at least some people find it useful ;)
Also back to your original mail I think that choosing the name "filesystem" is better than labelling it "/" as most people will understand the concept of the "filesystem" better than what / is and it would mean that look and feel could be maintained across different systems that may not have a root folder called / (i.e. Windows and its friends). I can't see that it would have taken that long to work out beyond clicking the button labelled Filesystem what it represented to someone familiar with Unix type file system layouts.
I for one remember the main stumbling block I had coming to Linux 8'ish years ago when trying to get the system installed was that disk druid in Redhat 5.1 kept telling me I didn't have a "root" filesystem, it took me a good hour to work out as a newbie coming from Windows & the Amiga that I needed to give the partition a label, and that the label needed to be "/", the trouble was that nowhere did it say that the "filesystem root" was called "/" (and at the same time I was having to deal with the concept of having a user called "root" which is about as clear as mud until you have the thing installed anyhow) and you needed to label it, of course looking up "root" in the index of the install manual pointed me to the user root.
Thanks Adam