I propose adding the following to the /etc/skel for new users, with funky icons on the folders to help increasing the clarity of where things are and some hints on helping them organise things. Note that with the introduction of things like ~/Contacts/, ~/Mail/ and ~/Settings, this gives the user a clear picture of where things are, and what things are important to back up (if they so choose). Some users may just see their mail as important, and not care about contacts or music. Others may see Contacts, Mail, Settings and Documents as important and can just (easily! with nautilus-cd-burner) write these to CD for backup. ~/Contacts - where evolution stores contacts, with human-readable file names (e.g. "Firstname Lastname.vcf" or something). ~/Desktop - same as it is now, the contents of the users desktop. ~/Documents - a suggested location for documents (and the default save location for applications such as OpenOffice) ~/Mail - where Evolution stores it's mail. ~/Movies - for the kick-ass iMovie type thing that we so need. ~/Music - Music Player's place to put music! ~/Photos - Gthumb's place to go, and the digital camera tool! ~/Web Pages - ==public_html (and shared by apache, if installed). I have no real expectation taht this will make Core3 in any complete way, but is a good talking point and UI suggestion. This will make it easier for users.
Created attachment 102565 [details] Example screenshot of home directory
This idea has some merit in the direction that we're trying to head. In our Brave New World (tm) we're aiming to create first class objects out of some of these types. While creating these directories provides a nice initial layout it forces people into an organization strategy that might not be optimal. A simple example can be seen with digital photos/movies. Most digital cameras offer the ability to capture small movies as well as take pictures. When you import these pictures, the movies and pictures should probably all remain together under an album or some kind of categorization. With the directory separation of Movies and Photos, the small movies that were taken along with the pictures would be separated into different folders when they have the most relation to each other as a group and not really to their media type.
I love this idea, it makes life easier for normal users.
Along the lines of what Bryan said, I'm not sure suggesting such an arbitrary organisation to people will really help people. It feels completely arbitrary - do we have any reason to believe that this is a natural orginisation method? The obvious big problem with any directories like this is internationalisation - we have no defined method for handling that right now. Finally, I don't think its very useful to keep a bug open on this (but I won't close it). We probably will only ever do this if we do it upstream first, so to really help see this through to fruition it would be a lot more useful to start talking about this upstream (xdg-list would be a good start)
I'll take it upstream and see what people thing. Although there is a problem seperating Photos and Movies, possibly some naming like "My Multimedia" or "Multimedia" or something could help remove the ambiguity(?). It has been suggested that it also be taken to xdg list (at freedesktop.org) - will do this shortly.
Okay, moving to nautilus anyway - it doesn't have any relevance to the gnome-desktop package.
Its not really a nautilus bug either. I know there has been lots of discussion on things like this upstream, we're well aware of the need of this. I am however gonna close this bug, because its not contributing to the upstream solution, its only making it hard to find real bugs in bugzilla atm. However, don't be discouraged from working on this upstream. (Although, don't expect things to happen immediately, these things take time.)