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Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica)Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica)Posted Oct 25, 2010 20:10 UTC (Mon) by AlexHudson (subscriber, #41828)In reply to: Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) by Arker Parent article: Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica)
Files & folders are a lot like democracy; it's a terribly broken solution that just happens to be better than anything else anyone has come up with.
I'll be interested to see the next version of Ubuntu. I don't get the difference between this and gnome-shell or why the various developers involved in these projects are doing it separately, but hopefully the end results will make that clearer...
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Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Oct 25, 2010 20:25 UTC (Mon) by Arker (guest, #14205) [Link]
Other than this silliness of calling them "folders" instead of "directories" what precisely is "broken" about them?
Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Oct 25, 2010 21:09 UTC (Mon) by rahvin (subscriber, #16953) [Link]
The fundamental problem with thinking the directories/files methodology can be replaced with a search model (something MS proposed years ago BTW) is failing to realize many people remember where they put things, but not what they called them. This is as true in real life as it is in computer files and it's the primary reason the file/folder methodology continues to this day. Until there is a real AI to act as a personal assistant and remember the names and content (much like in real life where the assistant handles the files) there will be little success with a search based file structure.
Files, Folders, and Search Posted Oct 25, 2010 21:59 UTC (Mon) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link]
While I generally agree with you, keep in mind that the modern generation of search solutions tends to search the contents of files, not just their names.
Both KDE and MacOS X have done a lot of work in this direction, and for a lot of the Mac people I've met it's become indispensable. (In KDE people still tend to turn it off because the indexing overhead has often been too noticable.)
Files, Folders, and Search Posted Oct 25, 2010 22:51 UTC (Mon) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
Tracker is pretty good. I've used it in the past, but I don't have it turned on right now.
It works and I think something like ZeitGeist would actually be REALLY F-ING useful for me at work.
For folders I frequently use in a GUI I arrange things according to date. When I am on the command line I've started using 'ls -ltr' habitually.
There comes a time when managing files manually and having well-laid out directories for managing information just does not scale.
Search helps a lot, but it would be even more useful to find ways to naturally be able to track _relationships_ between data. That would be fantastic.
Anybody who thinks that directory/file structure for managing information manually by humans....
How many times (and be honest) you were browsing the internet and found some interesting image or pdf or tarball or anything and you downloaded it and openned up in the default application.... and then _later_on_, maybe hours or weeks or months later decided that you wanted to look at that file again you just ended up searching the internet for it _again_ and _redownloaded_ it just because it was quicker and you were in a hurry?
I don't know about you, but it's much easier to remember text in a document, how I found a document, or relationships between different data (in some way shape or form) then it is to remember what I did with a file after I was done with it.
Anyways; GUI file managers are all piles of crap anyways. I rather use Nautilus compared to Finder or Explorer, but all three of them a pretty irritating to use. Especially when using Windows I always long for a nice Unix shell and on Windows machines I use a lot cygwin is universally installed. There just has to be a better way.
Files, Folders, and Search Posted Oct 26, 2010 7:57 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
"Anyways; GUI file managers are all piles of crap anyways. I rather use Nautilus compared to Finder or Explorer, but all three of them a pretty irritating to use. Especially when using Windows I always long for a nice Unix shell and on Windows machines I use a lot cygwin is universally installed. There just has to be a better way."
I miss FAR (http://www.farmanager.com/index.php?l=en) on Linux, it's _the_ best file manager in existence. Everything else seems clunky in comparison, including the 'most advanced' GUI managers like Dolphin in KDE.
Try it on Windows. Though it does have a steep learning curve, kinda like emacs/vim.
Files, Folders, and Search Posted Oct 26, 2010 10:34 UTC (Tue) by Seegras (subscriber, #20463) [Link]
Files, Folders, and Search Posted Oct 26, 2010 11:27 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
It only _looks_ like, unfortunately. It's nowhere close in functionality and ease of use.
There's a project to resurrect MC: http://www.midnight-commander.org/ - it _might_ one day produce FAR's rival. But it's still not comparable, so far.
Files, Folders, and Search Posted Oct 26, 2010 16:20 UTC (Tue) by aseigo (guest, #18394) [Link]
It's a gui, but have you tried Kommander?
Files, Folders, and Search Posted Oct 26, 2010 17:11 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
Do you mean 'Krusader'?
I think, I've tried all the two-panel managers in Linux. http://freshmeat.net/projects/XNorthernCaptain/ is most close to FAR in 'spirit' but its functionality is severely lacking.
It's certainly possible to live in Linux without file managers, but sometimes it's almost painful to write series of commands which can be done in a few keypresses in a good file manager. Does not happen that often, so it's not a deal-breaker.
I guess, users of vim/emacs feel the same when they are forced to use less powerful editors.
Files, Folders, and Search Posted Oct 26, 2010 16:56 UTC (Tue) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]
I actually think there's a need for both methods, applied to mostly different files. There are files that are part of a larger logical structure (source files in a project or chapters in a book you're writing), and these are stable enough to get a familiar filesystem location and the files have familiar names; there are also files that are not given memorable paths or names (either because the user doesn't expect to need them again, because the user didn't think about naming, or because the user's choice of name turned out not to be memorable), and these can be found with search.
I think the directory method is several orders of magnitude more effective at handling those files for which it is at all useful, so abandoning it would make certain important things extremely inefficient for many people. But it's also nearly useless for many other things, and search is better for those. In real life, I don't put every paper I have into some folder or other, because that kind of classification doesn't really make sense for everything; but I do put all of my tax records for the same year into a folder, and even having an effective content search wouldn't mean I could live without these folders, because I sometimes need to go through exactly those documents, and they don't share any content features which are distinctive.
I'd actually really like to see a system where users get some storage with names and some storage that's indexed, where either can be used but the defaults are sensible. Mainly, I think that files should only be in some particular directory when created with a "New File In This Directory" interface, and otherwise they're all in a single directory with random names that gets indexed. That is, using filenames for files should be supported and efficient, but there shouldn't be any encouragement to do it except when the user actually wants to.
Files, Folders, and Search Posted Oct 28, 2010 7:25 UTC (Thu) by russell (subscriber, #10458) [Link]
Just wondering. What is Search going to do with data that it can't analyse?
I have a directory tree in my home directory with 16 million map tiles, and lots of other non searchable stuff such as source code. What's it going to do when it see that. Spend days analysing them? Will I be forced to move stuff out of my home directory that isn't searchable? I think there is a big difference between a home directory where I control stuff and the internet where I don't.
Files, Folders, and Search Posted Oct 31, 2010 12:31 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
On the internet, you also don't spend your system's time and disk bandwidth doing the indexing.
Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Oct 25, 2010 23:39 UTC (Mon) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] many people remember where they put things, but not what they called them. Really?? I'm just the opposite. I remember what I call things, but forget where I put them. find or locate help me out. I like files and directories as a way to organize things.
Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Oct 26, 2010 2:03 UTC (Tue) by brouhaha (subscriber, #1698) [Link] Different people think in different ways. The system shouldn't force them to think one way or the other. For people that work most effectively with folders, that interface should be supported. For people that deal most effectively with search, that should be supported too. Some people will benefit from having both available.The kind of thinking that "folders are bad, search way better, so we're going to do away with folders and use search instead" should be studiously avoided.
Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Oct 26, 2010 14:36 UTC (Tue) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] Different people think in different ways. The system shouldn't force them to think one way or the other. We are in violent agreement on this point. That's why I get irritated when developers try to engage in social engineering and force the One True Way of doing things on their users.
Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Oct 26, 2010 21:32 UTC (Tue) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link] I remember what I call thingsWhich only works well if you're the one who names them. If you don't have control over the name- either because it's automatically named by whatever creates it or because you're collaborating with somebody else and they named it- then it can be hard.
Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Oct 27, 2010 15:48 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] If you don't have control over the name- either because it's automatically named by whatever creates it or because you're collaborating with somebody else and they named it- then it can be hard. True, which is why at work we use a revision-control system to collaborate on documents and we enforce naming guidelines. Yes, I successfully have non-technical people trained to use Subversion rather than mailing around things like "Press Release Foo - Revision 2 (DFS-Rev-1)" I'd love to have them on git, but Subversion was a steep-enough learning curve. :)
Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Oct 26, 2010 12:01 UTC (Tue) by Quazatron (guest, #4368) [Link]
And why can't we have both?
Sometimes you remember the location of a file, sometimes the name or content or creation date.
Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Oct 26, 2010 1:11 UTC (Tue) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link] The thing that's broken about folders/directories is that they impose a hierarchical model of file relationships that doesn't necessarily represent our mental model of their relationship. Each file has many properties, and I may care more about one property at one time and another property at a different time. If I sort them into a directory structure, that inherently imposes one specific organization on them that may make it difficult to find what I want if it turns out that I care about a different thing. That may not be a big deal if I'm looking for one specific file, but it can make life very tough if I'm looking for a whole class of files that may be scattered across a whole directory structure.As an example, I'm a photographer. I tend to sort my photographs into folders first by the year when I took them, then by a general subject (e.g. pictures I took when hiking), then by more specific criteria depending on the subject. That's OK when I'm looking for specific pictures- I can narrow things down a lot by remembering an approximate date and subject- but it's severely limiting if I want to do something more. I may want to do something more complicated, like search for all photos taken in a specific location, or taken with a particular lens, or with a shutter speed slower than 1s, or even all pictures taken within 1/2 hour of sunrise. Those are all criteria that I might want to consider using, and they're all things that I potentially could search on based on the metadata within my images*. But I obviously can't sort my pictures into folders according to all of those criteria. The only practical approach is to have really good support for metadata searches. There are currently programs designed specifically to support that kind of searching for photographs, but it would be better if it were supported at the OS level. *My camera can automatically geotag my images, which would let me sort them by location or even let me calculate local sunrise time and see if they were taken close to sunrise.
Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Oct 26, 2010 10:38 UTC (Tue) by Seegras (subscriber, #20463) [Link]
For pictures, the situation is quite nice, with all that EXIF. And for audio-files there's ID3.
But where are the tools to edit EXIF-tags in movies?
Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Oct 26, 2010 10:55 UTC (Tue) by job (guest, #670) [Link]
While the EXIF indexing is probably the right solution for you, I want to object to your notion that somehow can't sort your pictures into directories according to all of your criteria.
There is fundamentally no problem with this. A file can have a number of names and positions in a traditional directory hierarchy. There are a number of practical issues, such as that you have to delete all instances of the file to actually delete it which may not fit a photography collection, but there are issues with any system.
Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Oct 26, 2010 16:12 UTC (Tue) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106) [Link] What you're saying is that we can work around the problem with the current system.
Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Oct 26, 2010 18:26 UTC (Tue) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link] That's not a very practical solution. Pre-sorting into a whole set of directories according to my different criteria is theoretically possible, but has some severe limitations. Directory structures work best when the metadata in question takes on a relatively limited set of values. So it will work fine if I want to sort based on traditional photographic criteria, like lens, aperture, shutter speed, focal length, etc. But that type of sorting breaks down for values like latitude, longitude, or time, where there are literally millions or billions of possible discrete values.There's also the a matter of practicality. Yes, I can theoretically create a whole set of parallel directory structures each of which serves as a a way of sorting according to different criteria. But the more different criteria I use, the more cumbersome that solution gets. Just adding and deleting files gets to be a pain, since it involves creating or deleting numerous links. You'll wind up needing to create a whole set of new tools to create and maintain your fancy link structure. And all you're really doing is duplicating the functionality of a database- probably badly. At some point, it gets easier just to have the computer maintain a proper database rather than trying to do it with links. Once you've built the tools to maintain the database, a whole world of other possibilities opens up. You'll be able to use standard database queries to look for your files. Adding new file types only involves figuring out what kind of metadata they might want to use. There's a lot more upfront effort, but the potential payoff is huge.
Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Oct 26, 2010 11:36 UTC (Tue) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106) [Link]
What we need to fix these problems is file tagging via extended attributes. In addition to the 'canonical' file path each file could have a tag cloud of simple text labels, which might if well integrated into a UI come to replace hierarchies for most people's organizational needs.
I was looking around the other day for this because I wanted to start tagging images that are not always JPEGs and I figured someone must, by now, have developed a scheme for using extended attributes for file tagging. What I have found so far is that nothing for this is published anywhere, even if some application or other may implement it, and there's certainly no common standard.
On a *nix system a hard link acts a lot like a tag: One or more names is associated with a file. The down side to hard links is that adding a lot of them, like 20 or more, for a single file purely for the purpose of 'tagging' it becomes a management nightmare. Extended attributes would work nicely for simple label tagging, though it would be nicer if tags could be typed so that dates (date taken, etc) could be stored this way as well.
If file tools knew about tags in extended attributes then it would be a simple matter to add a few to any file and have a VFS which lets me see one directory per tag on any file on the system and drill down to specific files. Some indexing would be required for that, naturally, but even without it we could certainly all benefit from moving MP3 and JPEG tags into metadata where they belong, writing them back to the files only when we're ready to transfer across the network.
Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Oct 26, 2010 14:37 UTC (Tue) by jackb (subscriber, #41909) [Link]
"There are currently programs designed specifically to support that kind of searching for photographs, but it would be better if it were supported at the OS level."
You mean something like a filesystem that supported arbitrary file metadata and exposed it in a way that made it accessible to all programs without needing to go through a separate API?
Shuttleworth: Unity shell will be default desktop in Ubuntu 11.04 (ars technica) Posted Oct 26, 2010 19:13 UTC (Tue) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link] Honestly, I'm more of a user than a developer, so I don't really care that much about implementation details. What I know as a relatively sophisticated user is that my files are automatically generated with a ton of useful metadata, but that the system does a really poor job of taking advantage of it to make my life easier. I don't know enough about the potential tradeoffs to know if it's better handled by the kernel maintaining extended file attributes or by having the desktop environment keep it in a relational database. What I do know is that there's lots of data that we're not taking full advantage of, and that seems very wasteful.
Why directories are 'broken' Posted Oct 26, 2010 10:37 UTC (Tue) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link]
Watch any nontechnical person using Windows or the Mac. When a file is saved (from the office suite, from a browser download, wherever) they usually have no clue where it went. There is then a hunt through various incomprehensible magic places to find the file when they want to attach it to an email, etc. Either that, or they avoid folders altogether and save everything to the desktop background, that being the only place they can find it.
Arguably, it's not the folders model itself that is broken but rather Microsoft and friends who have broken it by obfuscating the directory hierarchy away from the user and making crappy filepickers in each application rather than a simple, usable file browser that's common to the whole desktop. But in its current state, and for most users, the nested-folders model isn't working well.
Why directories are 'broken' Posted Oct 26, 2010 16:59 UTC (Tue) by cry_regarder (subscriber, #50545) [Link]
"Arguably, it's not the folders model itself that is broken but rather Microsoft and friends who have broken it by obfuscating the directory hierarchy away from the user and making crappy filepickers in each application rather than a simple, usable file browser that's common to the whole desktop."
Amen!
Why directories are 'broken' Posted Oct 26, 2010 20:25 UTC (Tue) by droundy (subscriber, #4559) [Link]
Alas, inkscape (and probably other programs) breaks things in much the same ways. It ignores its initial working directory, and instead maintains two distinct "working directories" for saving and opening, which are preserved across instances of inkscape and unaffected by the location of the file currently being edited.
Having recently used inkscape a bit, this was *very* frustrating. It'd be lovely if our GUI programs could use the "folder" approach nicely...
Why directories are 'broken' Posted Oct 26, 2010 20:23 UTC (Tue) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
once they figure out that they can have everything go to the desktop, and have folders there, most people start using folders fairly well.
the problem is that the OS/application defaults put the files somewhere else that makes sense to the application developer, but not necessarily anyone else
Why directories are 'broken' Posted Oct 27, 2010 14:33 UTC (Wed) by ibukanov (subscriber, #3942) [Link]
> Watch any nontechnical person using Windows or the Mac.
Yes. I have observed that for almost 15 years. People cannot find a file unless it is on Desktop. This has become worse with recent tendency to use Downloads or similar folder by default to save files.
What is interesting is that many people seems just remember the location of the file on desktop and if the icons is rearranged they have some hard time initially. For those people the button that MS have added in Windows 98 (or something) to show the desktop was a real productivity boost and so was the ability to drag files from the desktop to open them in applications (like mail attachments etc.)
Yet it seems all those modern interfaces do not try to explore that tagging by visual location on the screen.
Why directories are 'broken' in Windows apps Posted Oct 30, 2010 0:37 UTC (Sat) by stevem (subscriber, #1512) [Link]
Absolutely. I can't count the number of times my gf asked me for help to find the document that she just edited by clicking on links in email or IE.
Now she's got a Linux machine and she's much happier.
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