Filesystem - hiding system folders?

[Tristan Wibberley]

Jason Taylor wrote:
>> Why not simply hide the "Filesystem" link to '/' from Nautilus for users
>> that are not members of the 'admin' group?
> 
> Why not indeed if no sudo access, then no root access seems logical
> 

/usr/share/doc/
/usr/share/
/opt/somethirdpartyprogram/examples

IMHO it's best not to second guess your users intentions or
requirements. Only the very newest of users won't want to look in those
directories, and they will simply not explore if they are afraid. Never
underestimate the users ability to be totally and utterly disinterested
in the technical bits and thus successfully ignore them without having a
nervous breakdown. Perhaps, though, it would make sense for nautilus to
highlight path elements that lead back to the user's home directory, in
case the user doesn't realise there's a "Go" menu.

Windows only needs %SYSTEMROOT% tidied up because users have
traditionally had to navigate it to get to their files in many cases.
Since UNIX has "~" it has been unnecessary and ought to remain so. If it
has become necessary for newbies to visit / just to find their own
files, then the desktop environment is borked.

Nautilus works: Ctrl-l  ~  <enter>

  takes you to your home directory

gedit doesn't: Ctrl-l  ~  <enter>

  "Could not retrieve information about the file
   error accessing 'file:///media/cdrom0/~': File not found"

Irritatingly, nautilus has no way I can find to quickly navigate around
at the keyboard when you know the paths. everything seems to be absolute
or ~-relative. You can type a directory name in the current directory,
then <enter><enter> followed by a subdirectory, etc, but you can't do
dir1/dir2/dir3/dir4<enter><enter>. It's amazing people can bear to do
everything without going to the commandline, it must take *ages*.

-- 
Tristan Wibberley