Review Request: Make folderview follow some guidelines

[Anne-Marie Mahfouf]

On Sunday 14 December 2008 21:23:22 Steven wrote:
> Unless the "Desktop" folder were a symbolic link to the "Downloads"
> folder... but this might be confusing to the average user... Would plasma
> able to tell the difference, so that as soon a the user implicitly
> indicates they want a Desktop folder, it is created separately?
arghh what is all this mix up!!! KDE follows XDG specs and then the user 
chooses how he wants to organize its stuff. 

Plasma already allows to do I believe everything possible and very easily. I 
have seen screenshots of people with amazing desktops, totally different ones. 
(maybe a serie of articles on this would be a good idea or blogs)

All distros also follow XDG specs and propose as default the standard folders 
in the user HOME at the creation of a user.
> Or would it be possible to have, when plasma starts for the first time, it
> reconfigures such programs to use the Downloads folder if the Desktop
> folder is not present. This seems too kludgey...
The Desktop and Download folders should always be present (as well as 
Documents and some others as a matter of fact). Whether they are used and how 
is another matter. 
And any discussion about this should be done at FreeDesktop mailing list where 
the standard originates from.
> The problem is really that people are really used to a desktop folder for
> downloads and for program launchers (sometimes, people don't really know
> the difference between these two concepts, as they  think the launcher *is
> *the program they downloaded) And, though this can be emulated more cleanly
> with icons and a downloads folder view, people might have trouble with
> this, especially the need to unlock the desktop to add an icon (not doing
> so results in a crash).
??? People are used to very different things in term of Desktop use. I for 
example use my desktop in a total different way than my husband. You cannot 
say "people" and stay vague in that matter. Nor can you based all uses on YOUR 
use or on 1 profile use.

KDE has a usability team. When you have ideas such as those in your mail, 
please contact this team. See if your user follows an already "user profile" 
or "persona". If you have a use case not already thought of by the usability 
team then they'll help making out some positive ideas from your thoughts.

The usability team worked on this and is still working. They interviewed 
people to make out different sort of users. 

Plasma is something that has been worked on, and by specialists! And those 
specialists are always keen to get more use cases so please contact them and 
help make your point taken into account in a positive way.

I just realize that Celeste wrote in this thread (which enforces my point 
about Usability!) so it's even easier for you to contact her as you have her 
mail!!!

Anne-Marie

PS: this discussion started because of 2 bugs and was not intented to be a 
Redesign Plasma Desktop brainstorm nor a XDG one.
Looking at different code (KGlobalSettings) it seems to me that KDE started 
using QDesktopServices in August thus following XDG standards better but some 
old code was left over. KDE defaulted to $HOME for standard folders prior to 
August and still is in some places. QDesktopServices itself is unclear whether 
it follows XDG and if I'd know the right person to talk to, I'd ask some 
questions about this Qt class... Confusion in code from /Desktop and $HOME 
probably generated lead to those bugs at the first place.