Does anyone ever say this in an office setting: "Hey George, where'd you put the file I was looking at this morning?"
"Oh, that one? I moved it to the trash. But I can restore it." No, of course not. That's stupid. If anyone said that I'd think they were an idiot. So why does my OS come off that way, especially one that got almost everything else so right, to the point where I am continually amazed? It makes me feel sad and disgusted. Congrats for not flat-out copying Microsoft, but is copying Apple any better? As someone who has had to use a Mac for almost 2 years at work, I'm absolutely positive that OSX is not an extremely worthy model to imitate, either. We don't need a system of metaphors designed to completely obfuscate the terms that have evolved to describe things most accurately already. On a computer when you get rid of a file, regardless of any potential holding bin, the concept is that you have decided to part with it forever. That fact that it can still be restored, somehow, is NOT a conscious part of the workflow at hand. It is merely an artifact of the virtual nature of computers. A file can be restored, sure, but that fact exists outside of the conscious workflow. So why does my OS make me consider irrelevant information? The fact that computers are virtual and operations can be reversed or undone is immaterial. If you're working on a song, you can delete a note. If you're writing a story, you can delete a paragraph. Conceptually, it's gone at that point, erased from your conscious work. Likewise, you can delete/erase/remove/discard a file, in terms of a file management app. It's NOT a movement or a relocation, conceptually. The operation I have in mind when I throw something out is not to store it. It's to DISCARD it, generally forever. I'm DONE with it. It's no longer in the picture. "Move to trash" by no means describes what I'm doing. For all I care, the janitor can take whatever I put in there, and haul it away, all without any further consideration from me. (Besides, trash cans in real life have discarded gum and tissues. Sick!) So aside from just being irrelevant, the metaphor being used doesn't even correctly describe the situation. It's a unix system, so maybe the item should be "Remove file." That'd be fine. "Delete" is fine, too. It corresponds with the "undelete" operation. The reverse operation of remove would be "restore." -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Desktop Bugs, which is a bug assignee. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/388656 Title: Non-intuitive term "Move to trash" To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/hundredpapercuts/+bug/388656/+subscriptions -- desktop-bugs mailing list desktop-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/desktop-bugs
