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Why Users Blame Spatial Nautilus
An anonymous reader writes "OSNews has a commentary on spatial Gnome and why you KDE/Windows people hate them so much (hint: because almost all of you use Windows and/or a Windows 'interface clone'). Steve Jobs, however, denounced spatial interfaces because they make the users janitors. Hmmm!"
Yes please, can I have some more?
Yes, I'm sure it would be perfect if all files were only 2 directories deep, but achieving that would require you to really really want it (for philosophical reasons?), and waste your time on it. It's not real-world though.
In the article (I read it) it says that the spatial nautilius mimicks the way physical objects behave, ie by staying in the same place unless you put it somewhere else etc (not replacing the directory you had open). This works fine in the physical world, but computer systems are often more complex (or more simple but act in a different way, depends on how you see it), and therefore we have developed suitable abstractions and interfaces to be able to interact with them. The "browser" mode is one of these. It prevents clutter, and it's easy to get at both folders a level above and below where you are in the directory structure.
BTW, congratulations on getting an extreme flamebait submission accepted.
If you have to get used to it: It's not intuitive. Please understand this. If it has a learning curve that means people need to get used to it, it's not bloody intuitive! Apple Zealots seem to fall for this sooo much.
Now, not being intuitive doesn't mean it's a bad interface. Some programs have non-intuitive interfaces that require (sometimes steep) learning curves: Grapics editors (photoshop, gimp...) 3d Editors (Blender comes to mind for the praise people who have mastered that learning curve heap on it, and the scorn those who haven't: suggesting it's a good design, but not intuitive.), CAD programs, and other complicated ones.
GNOME is going for the philosopy that good= intuitive= simple= striped-down-to- lowest-common-denominator. It's a choice they made. User options are regarded as bad things. The user shouldn't have to think. Which is fine for some users who only do very basic things or just happen to work/think the way the GNOME devs do, but it tends to highly annoy most other people. Honestly, why does almost every servey of Linux users come out with KDE being lots more popular, even in the US? I think it comes down to: KDE offers the user choice. Can anyone name a GUI interface that everyone likes with default settings? I don't like OS X, nor BeOS, nor Windows, nor GNOME, nor (shudder) CDE, nor even KDE's Keramic. I can use all of them, but they annoy me. If you like one of those, use it, but don't claim that it is the one true best one.
Oh, and apparently intuitive's spelling isn't intuitive, nor is it's definition.
I've been listening to this stupid Nautilus flaming ever since it first came out. Unfortunately, it seems that today's computer using community is largely divisible into two groups. One group likes the Windows way, and one group likes the MacOS way. Then there's the minority who prefer the CLI, Amiga, Atari, VMS, or the C64.
I just want to know why anyone even cares what the default on Nautilus is. I mean, seriously. Who here on Slashdot uses the default for anything. Aren't you geeks? Don't you edit your damn .zshrc to your liking, or the equivalent for whatever shell you use? I've seen this gconf-editor (I don't use GNOME, or KDE, or any other fruity desktop environment, for that matter) and it's not that big a deal. It's not like you couldn't figure out how to do it.
Personally, GUIs annoy me. I probably would prefer the browser paradigm to the spacial paradigm, but I'm not such a fucking pansy that I can't be bothered to change a little, well documented configuration option, and I certainly wouldn't be here whining on Slashdot about it.
For those of you that like the browser system: use it. For those of you that like the spacial system: use that. The GNOME devs are guessing that the majority of new users (ie, the grandma you dorks are always going on about) are going to prefer the spacial system, and you know what, they're probably right. My Grandma could use early MacOS. Not so with the new versions, no matter how pretty they may be. I'm sure (though I don't pretend to be a UI expert, unlike every geek on Slashdot) that the spacial paradigm had something to do with that.
God, you guys are the worst. I've been saying all along: if you want Joe User on Linux, you're going to end up with a shitty default UI -- keep it hobbiest, so we can do what we like -- but NOOOooo. Gotta make "desktop penetration" a goal. Gotta "bring down MS". Couldn't let a good thing be. So now you have all these "user-friendly" efforts going on that are exactly what Joe User would benefit from, and GUESS WHAT? They suck for power users. Thats how it works. As they say, if you sleep with dogs...