Bug#371882: a few minutes with gnome virgins

[Michael Gilbert]

Package: gnome
Severity: normal

at work the other day a couple windows-locked coworkers of mine were 
attempting to use a fedora system.  they were attempting to figure out 
if a particular application was available on the system.  they had no 
idea where to go to do a file search (they expected it to be in the
start menu, but gave up after they found it wasn't under applications).  
so then they tried nautilus, but couldn't figure out where to go.  they
dropped down to / where they were even more dumbfounded.  a comment was
"what are all these  directories and how am i supposed to find anything
in this mess."  i suggested looking in /usr/local and /opt but both came 
up empty.

i suggested that they try the search under the gnome places menu, at
which point they were able to find some similarity to their expectations.  
at first they used the defaults and only searched in their home directory 
(inadvertently assuming that the file must not be on the disk even 
though their search path was too limited), at which point i said you should
search from the / directory.  they opened the gnome file selector, and could 
not figure out how to pick / (in fact they didn't understand the concept of /, 
or how it relates to something like c:).  i also didn't know how to 
select / directly from the gnome file selector this, but eventually
figured out if you select the topmost directory breakout at the top of the
file selector  that you will get / as your selection.  this is very 
non-obvious and needs to be fixed.  so they tried their search, which 
completed *way* too fast for their expectations (likely because they are 
used to windows searches taking significant time to search an entire 
disk because file lists are not cached as scrollkeeper does).  so i did
a "find / | grep fname" which also came up empty to indicate to them 
that indeed the file they were looking for was not on the system.

at one point another comment was "it seems like they do things 
differently just to be different," referring to the gnome desktop in 
general vs windows.

anyway, hope you can find some useful bits from the mindset virgin gnome 
users.  need more details?  just ask.

mike

-- System Information:
Debian Release: testing/unstable
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (600, 'testing'), (500, 'unstable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Shell:  /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Kernel: Linux 2.6.15-1-686
Locale: LANG=en_US, LC_CTYPE=en_US (charmap=ISO-8859-1)