I prefer them on the desktop because they're bigger, and for most of my users at least one of these is true: (1) they don't see very well, or (2) the concept of “panel” is very unfamiliar.
Since the audience is very non-technical, metaphors need to conform to real-life better: important things are big and separated. Accessing all the important (for them) functions of a computer through a few tiny icons near a corner is not intuitive. Choosing what they need from a few big (scaled) icons on the desktop with descriptive names is easier. Having them undeletable (even fixed in position) I conjecture would be useful because of the many cases I've encountered where users come to me for help because they lost an app, or several. It was always just a case of accidentally dragging them somewhere out of view, in a folder or recycle bin. This is also a failure of the metaphor: low-on-computer-skills users don't expect that big concepts as a browser should be as easy to move and loose like a file, just as you can't usually misplace your TV... However, one of your earlier comments is relevant: gnome-shell will probably be easier to adapt for this kind of users. -- Bogdan Butnaru On Thu, Sep 17, 2009 at 2:54 PM, Alexander Larsson <al...@redhat.com> wrote: > > Why do you need these on the desktop though, gnome generally puts > launcher shortcuts on the panel. Also, do you need them to be > undeletable? > > Also, can't you just put the link in /etc/skel ? > > On Thu, 2009-09-17 at 11:14 +0200, Bogdan Butnaru wrote: >> On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 10:15 AM, Alexander Larsson <al...@redhat.com> wrote: >> > That said, I know we got a lot of demands for this from some directions. >> > I think we need to go back to them and try to understand exactly what >> > they want to use this for, and why the current methods of e.g. bookmarks >> > and application launching is not good enough for them. Maybe they have >> > some interesting usecases that we could solve generically in a better >> > way? >> >> I've got exactly two use cases for which such a feature would have been >> useful: >> >> 1) My family (no familiarity with computers) >> 2) Guest users (no familiarity with Ubuntu) >> >> In both cases, though for different reasons, their way of using the >> computer is extremely different from mine. While all that >> desktop-as-workspace concept applies well enough to me, it doesn't to >> the cases above. Other people usually need to use my computer for >> simple things: browse the web, check e-mail or chat a bit, and maybe >> read or print a document. For anything more complex, they'd ask me to >> do it, and I'd use my own account. Also, such users have no >> familiarity with Ubuntu or Linux (e.g., position of menus), and >> sometimes even with the concept of menu (e.g., my mom). >> >> For these situations I've often wanted a way to create a “default” >> account with a handful of big, commonly-used icons (e.g., a link to >> Firefox named just “Internet” in big, friendly letters). For my >> parents I had to do it by hand, but it's annoying enough that I can't >> do it for more people. -- nautilus-list mailing list nautilus-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/nautilus-list
