Make Places Useful and Easy
For now, users have few places in their home : Desktop and maybe Documents if they add it manually. Default home should come with Pictures, Movies, Music, Documents, Projects, Templates and other by default. We should drop the useless Desktop and Home entries from the Places menu. Each Places must have an emblem like Desktop has.
Gimp, Inkscape, xsane, gthumb, gnome-screenshot, etc. must save by default in Pictures ; OOo and gnome-office in Documents, Kino in Movies ; Planner, Anjuta and MonoDevelop in Projects ; sound-juicer in Music ; etc.
That would be good to have a Config directory to store app configuration.
Blueprint information
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Related branches
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See also xdg-user-dirs special dirs handling.
See also:
https:/
* Have the default home come with Pictures, Movies, Music, Documents...sounds like a good idea to me, new Linux users are often confused about where they should store their documents, this could help them get started.
* A separate Config directory to store application configuration sounds good to me also.
But it is more or less a Linux standard, see:
http://
"User specific configuration files for applications are stored in the user's home directory in a file that starts with the '.' character (a "dot file"). If an application needs to create more than one dot file then they should be placed in a subdirectory with a name starting with a '.' character, (a "dot directory"). In this case the configuration files should not start with the '.' character."
But there is still hope as:
"/home is a fairly standard concept, but it is clearly a site-specific file system. The setup will differ from host to host."
However it could be hard to change this, as many applications use this directory. Again from the same page:
"If you want to find out a user's home directory, you should use the getpwent(3) library function rather than relying on /etc/passwd because user information may be stored remotely using systems such as NIS."
Also of interest on the page:
"It is recommended that apart from autosave and lock files programs should refrain from creating non dot files or directories in a home directory without user intervention."
But shouldn't this be a separate Feature Specification?
* About using metadata to organize documents... that would only work with Nautillus, not the console or other file managers.
"Default home should come with Pictures, Movies, Music, Documents, Projects, Templates and other by default.": Why? Don't just mimic Microsoft without thinking about whether it's really the best way to do things. Isn't dividing things up into "Music" and "Pictures" somewhat arbitrary? Wouldn't it also make sense, for instance, to have pictures you took of your favorite band in the same folder as their music files? (A tag-based file system would be better, of course, allowing you to view all music files at once, or view all files related to a certain band at once, or whatever...)
