If we already do it this way, it must be wrong.
I don’t understand why we need to “revolutionize” the way EVERY SINGLE THING works. Look at Mark Shuttleworth’s coverage of a recent Gnome usability hackfest in which no actual hacking was done.
There’s a revolution coming as we throw out the old “files and folders” metaphor and leap to something new, and it would be phenomenal if free software were leading the way.
Yeah man! I guess that whole, “make the ‘virtual’ desktop more like the ‘real’ desktop” thing is a joke. Unless your main switch is to limit it to 2 levels deep, call the first level a “Drawer” then the second a “Folder” and underneath only files, but I somehow doubt that. I don’t have a problem with a tag based filesystem, I’ve written about it before (as we’re getting closer with punakea, tag(1), and the fabled WinFS), but the solution isn’t to have just one or just the other, it’s to have both. Gmail gets this right: you can label (tag) e-mails in your Inbox or All Mail folder, but they’re not throwing out the idea of a folder entirely, they’re tagged and yet still also in a folder.
Sure, one could easily state that the “All Mail” folder is totally throwing away folders, but it’s not, it’s a folder for Mail. Even on your desktop mail client, while it’s all in one folder it’s still limited to the mail client, not strewn about on your file system in the “mega folder” known as the hard disk.
The benefit to this mixed technique is really applicable for things where tags are used as genres, especially if you are able to use tag+othertag to get items that are in multiple genres.
But I’m insane 
