Shell and Zeitgeist: the future of GNOME?

Posted Apr 25, 2009 10:12 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: Shell and Zeitgeist: the future of GNOME? by bojan
Parent article: Shell and Zeitgeist: the future of GNOME?

The problem may not be 'kids'. I remember when my dad retired I had a look
at his work machine.

Everything he'd done for the previous ten years or so was in *one*
enormous directory. He'd noticed things were getting 'rather slow'...

This is how a lot of non-computer-people seem to organise things. Just
save it on the desktop until we run out of room... though the user
interface calls them 'folders' (yuck), they don't actually act enough like
real file folders for people to realise how they can be used without
tuition.

(Of course 'non-computer-people' are literally a dying breed these days.
Pretty much everyone under the age of 30 probably understands how
hierarchical directories are used, at least to some extent.)

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Shell and Zeitgeist: the future of GNOME?

Posted Apr 27, 2009 11:17 UTC (Mon) by fatrat (guest, #1518) [Link] (2 responses)

"Pretty much everyone under the age of 30 probably understands how
hierarchical directories are used, at least to some extent."

Not the ones I see, or at least not beyond the basics. Everything on the desktop is the most common, with probably some folders called "old" or similar to chuck stuff in when that gets full

Shell and Zeitgeist: the future of GNOME?

Posted Apr 27, 2009 12:51 UTC (Mon) by jzbiciak (guest, #5246) [Link] (1 responses)

I'm far from computer illiterate, but I find myself guilty of this level of organizational laziness, at least with my work computer. I have a folder named "CRAP" on my desktop, and every so often I haul another batch of stuff there.

My desktop acts like a spatial LRU for files.

Shell and Zeitgeist: the future of GNOME?

Posted Apr 27, 2009 17:16 UTC (Mon) by amarjan (guest, #25108) [Link]

Guilty? Why guilty?

The simple fact is that a strict hierarchy is a really lousy way to organize most things, and that's all that a filesystem gives you. (Except in Unix we have links, so we can have cycles in our trees, yay.)

David Weinberger said it far better than I ever could in a lecture some years ago. Video and audio are here:

http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/mtarchive/003386.html

I refuse to be guilted about my "poor" file organization habits when the system I have available for organizing my files is half-assed and inadequate. Any given file may belong in an arbitrary number of buckets and it's the computer's job to keep track of that, not mine. After all, why do we have DBMS-managed indexes instead of doing it all by hand?

Personally I think a combination of arbitrary metadata and fulltext/metadata search would be the bee's knees, but I don't know of anything that does that yet -- most systems tend to do one or the other. Nepomuk is supposed to do both, if/when it gets into a usable state.