RFE: User-Understandable Default folders in Home Directory

[David Malcolm]

On Wed, 2004-08-11 at 00:57 +1000, Stewart Smith wrote:
> a bit like what OSX has, i've been thinking that a set of default
> folders (with some cool icons) could help users a bit.

I do something like this on my own folders at home, using emblems.

I broadly like your idea (with some caveats concerning Evolution, see
below), though in the blue-sky future perhaps we'll all be using Storage
to organise our stuff, rather than this 20th century directory-based
technology :-)
(see http://www.gnome.org/~seth/storage/ )


> I've put this up at :
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=129564
> 
> simply so it's kinda 1/2 officially tracked, and in the future, people
> with the same idea can (easily) find some track of discussion....
> 
> I propose adding the following to the /etc/skel for new users, with
> funky icons on the folders to help increasing the clarity of where
> things are and some hints on helping them organise things.
> 
> Note that with the introduction of things like ~/Contacts/, ~/Mail/
> and ~/Settings, this gives the user a clear picture of where things
> are, and what things are important to back up (if they so choose).
> 
> Some users may just see their mail as important, and not care about
> contacts or music. Others may see Contacts, Mail, Settings and
> Documents as important and can just (easily! with nautilus-cd-burner)
> write these to CD for backup.
> 
> ~/Contacts - where evolution stores contacts, with human-readable file
> names (e.g. "Firstname Lastname.vcf" or something).

Currently Evolution 1.5.* stores its data (contacts, calendar, email
etc) below the ~/.evolution directory and in GConf, and makes various
assumptions about the layout of the ~/.evolution directory.  Evolution
could be changed to follow this proposal for "local contacts" (as
opposed to contacts found on e.g. a shared corporate LDAP database), but
it'd be non-trivial.

A better way of accessing the contact information might be to use
evolution-data-server API; this should handle nasty details such as file
locking for you.

If what you're really looking for is a sane way for home users to backup
this data, I think a specialised tool could be written that knows about
the various kinds of data that are stored on your computer
(configuration settings, contents of home directory etc) and can display
them in a good UI, tell you how big the backup is going to be etc, and
maybe create ISO files ready to be burned to CD for you.

> ~/Desktop - same as it is now, the contents of the users desktop.
> ~/Documents - a suggested location for documents (and the default save
> location for applications such as OpenOffice)
> ~/Mail - where Evolution stores it's mail.

Again, Evolution makes all kinds of assumptions about the layout of its
mail directory; it's not something I'd want to expose to end users.
Thankfully with Evo 1.5.* this is now in ~/.evolution, rather than
~/evolution as it used to be before, so it's not quite as in-your-face
as before.

> ~/Movies - for the kick-ass iMovie type thing that we so need.

Yes please!

> ~/Music - Music Player's place to put music!

Good idea IMHO

> ~/Photos - Gthumb's place to go, and the digital camera tool!

Also a good idea IMHO

> ~/Web Pages - ==public_html (and shared by apache, if installed).

Nice idea.  Though you'd have to have some extra control panel applets
to do things like turning apache on/off etc and punch through the
firewall, or people could get confused.

> 
> I have no real expectation taht this will make Core3 in any complete
> way, but is a good talking point and UI suggestion. This will make it
> easier for users.