planet gnome comment

Matthew Paul Thomas mpt at canonical.com
Wed Aug 31 21:46:35 CDT 2005


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On 29 Aug, 2005, at 8:50 PM, josuealcalde wrote:
>
> I think the default option should be the most used option by Ubuntu
> users. Of course, I don't know how to know such a thing.

Personally, I think the default should be the option most 
understandable to those who don't have the skills, confidence, or time 
to configure their file manager at all. That's not going to happen for 
Breezy, but I'm delighted Breezy's Nautilus is going to be much better 
than Hoary's.

> When I used win95, something similar to spatial mode was the default,
> and I changed it to something similar to browser mode because I
> prefered it.
>
> I think most of users prefered it, because win98 used browser mode.

Actually, Windows 95 defaulted to a semi-spatial mode (only 
semi-spatial, because it forgot window positions occasionally) until 
you installed Internet Explorer 4.0. IE4's "Desktop Update" heavily 
modified the Windows 95 file manager, introducing browser mode so that 
Internet Explorer could be more "integrated" with Windows than Netscape 
was.

Nautilus gave up on trying to be a Web browser several years ago, and 
Ubuntu isn't trying to fight off Netscape (or Firefox), so any parallel 
with Windows Explorer doesn't really apply.

> ...
> Perhaps, Ubuntu needs an "one-time-configuration-tool" which would
> pop-up in the first user session and will adjust this kind of things.
> (KDE has something similar, hasn't it?)
> ...

That wouldn't be consistent with Ubuntu's usual behavior of choosing 
good defaults and then getting out of your way. Nautilus's browser mode 
is a good default for people already using Linux, because for those 
people, the delay caused by orienting themselves in folders that all 
appear in exactly the same size and position is likely to be less than 
the delay caused by closing multiple windows when they've finished.

- -- 
Matthew Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/
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