I don't use GNOME, but... [LWN.net]

I don't use GNOME, but...

Posted Jan 27, 2010 9:29 UTC (Wed) by gowen (guest, #23914)
In reply to: I don't use GNOME, but... by dgm
Parent article: Stormy Peters: What should the GNOME Foundation accomplish in 2010?

I am a native english speaker, but I agree entirely. Also, "Folder" has an intuitive visual icon, whereas directory does not (what would it be, a picture of a telephone directory?). Even file managers that call them directories, tend to use icons that look like folders.

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I don't use GNOME, but...

Posted Jan 27, 2010 16:27 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

The whole 'directory'/'folder' concept is just shit all around. It's a bad
abstraction and never really made sense. It was designed by Xerox as part
of a basic GUI to run a printer, FFS.

But it's one we are stuck with.

Folders make sense in Gnome because not everything you see as a folder is
really a directory on your file system. You have your 'fonts' folder. It
corrisponds with stuff that goes on in ~/.fonts, but only loosely. Same
things with folders when your using 'smb://' to view windows servers or
whatever.

There are all sorts of little things like that. It is really very bad and
makes things more confusing unless you happen to have a good understanding
of what is happening in a OS, but it mostly works as long as users don't
think about things too deeply.

You can thank Microsoft and Apple for this.