On Jun 8, 2006, at 3:47 PM, Loïc Minier wrote:<br>> ...<br>> """<br>> at work the other day a couple windows-locked coworkers of mine were<br>> attempting to use a fedora system. they were attempting to figure out
<br>> if a particular application was available on the system. they had no<br>> idea where to go to do a file search (they expected it to be in the<br>> start menu, but gave up after they found it wasn't under applications).
<br><br>Hardly surprising: a file search definitely isn't a "place". It's not<br>an application either, but at least "Applications" looks vaguely like a<br>Start menu.<br><br>> so then they tried nautilus, but couldn't figure out where to go.
<br>> they dropped down to / where they were even more dumbfounded. a<br>> comment was "what are all these directories and how am i supposed to<br>> find anything in this mess."<br><br>That problem will continue until Fedora begins using human-readable
<br>directory names (like GoboLinux, Mac OS, and Windows all do to varying<br>extents).<br><br>> ...<br>> i suggested that they try the search under the gnome places menu, at<br>> which point they were able to find some similarity to their
<br>> expectations. at first they used the defaults and only searched in<br>> their home directory (inadvertently assuming that the file must not be<br>> on the disk even though their search path was too limited),
<br><br>Again, they were right and the OS was wrong. The default should be to<br>search everything you can access, just like in Web search engines,<br>because (a) you are likely to be searching for programs, which usually
<br>aren't in your home folder, and (b) searching everything will usually<br>be quicker (as you suggested later) than choosing a correct scope then<br>searching within that.<br><br>> at which point i said you should search from the / directory. they
<br>> opened the gnome file selector, and could not figure out how to pick /<br>> (in fact they didn't understand the concept of /, or how it relates to<br>> something like c:). i also didn't know how to select / directly from
<br>> the gnome file selector this, but eventually figured out if you select<br>> the topmost directory breakout at the top of the file selector that<br>> you will get / as your selection. this is very non-obvious and needs
<br>> to be fixed.<br><br>Fortunately the dialog doesn't use the inscrutable "/" terminology, but<br>"File System" isn't much better, and the icon for it seems to be a<br>harmonica. Unfortunately there isn't really any good name for
<br>"collection of obscurely-named things that has your files hidden in it<br>somewhere, and your programs in it spread across several other places,<br>but which can't be called your hard disk because it has your other
<br>drives hidden inside it too".<br><br>> so they tried their search, which completed *way* too fast for their<br>> expectations (likely because they are used to windows searches taking<br>> significant time to search an entire disk because file lists are not
<br>> cached as scrollkeeper does).<br>> ...<br><br>This is a bug in that while the Find tool tells you "No files found",<br>it does not mention what it was searching for, so there is no way to<br>distinguish between a search that has finished with no results and one
<br>that hasn't started yet.<br><br>Thanks for your interesting report.<br><br>--<br>Matthew Paul Thomas<br><a href="http://mpt.net.nz/">http://mpt.net.nz/</a><br>