[RFC] "Documents Folder" icon in "system:/"

[James Richard Tyrer]

David Johnson wrote:
> On Monday 15 August 2005 07:28 am, James Richard Tyrer wrote:
> 
> 
>> Training?  Your logic here fails.  New KDE users don't fall off 
>> Turnip trucks.  Statistically speaking, most of them are Windows 
>> users.  You may not want to believe it but in Windows there is a 
>> directory named "My Documents" which is a subdirectory of the 
>> directory with the account name.
> 
> 
> One of these days your statistic won't be true. Then what do we do? 
> Throw in the towel and call it quits? Tell the users to wait a year 
> while we go recode everything for the new demographic? Of course not!
>  The unfortunate fact is that whatever we do now is what we have to 
> do until the end of time (or as long as KDE has to worry about home 
> directories). So we need to do things the right way instead of the 
> Windows way.

I believe that the question at issue is only what to use as a default.
We would not have to "recode everything" to change the default.  As I
said, the code needs to respect the users choice of path for Documents.
  If we do that, there wouldn't be any need to change anything except the
default if it was decided that we wanted to change the default back to
Documents=$HOME.

> The Macintosh does NOT do things the Windows way, and in particular
> does not do the home directory the Windows way. But last I heard it
> had a pretty damned good reputation in the usability department,
> despite the fact that statistically most Mac newbies are Windows
> users.

I do not have a Mac with OS/X so it would help if you described how it
does the directory tree for the user account directory and where it
stores user files.

> Newbies never remain newbies for long. They may remain non-technical 
> but they won't remain newbies. I don't think we should consider such 
> an ephemeral and transient group to be our core demographic.

Yes, but ... (tm) it is newbies that defaults should be designed for 
since they will not start changing defaults as soon as they first login. 
  When they are no longer newbies, they can change settings to suit 
their needs.

-- 
JRT