Comment 53 for bug 15495

I may have a different solution, that addresses the needs of most points addressed here.

In the Gnome menu, for example Applications > Accessories, each application should have both a title name and a description beneath it, preferably with a small font size and silver-grey coloured text.

For example, the "Terminal" option in the Accessories menu has the same problem as the Archive Manager; if people don't know what a terminal is they don't know what it does. With a small description beneath it saying "Opens a command prompt" would clarify the use of the application instantly to new users, and would make new users to ubuntu find equivalent applications quicker without having to choose a very generic name for each application.

Conveying this idea to the Archive Manager dilemma, i propose:

1. In the Applications menu the original "Archive Manager" title, with a description labeled "Let's you create and edit compressed files" would both be correct and still most users would recognise this as an equivalent to WinZIP/WinRAR.

2. In the file manager (nautilus), users should just be able to doubleclick archives as if they were folders, but they should be folders with a very specific colour to indicate these are compressed. While looking inside the archive, users should be able to copy/paste files in and out to edit the archive.

3. When right-clicking the archive, users should see:
- "Open zip archive" (if its a tar archive it should say tar archive)
- "Extract archive" (would "remove the colour" of the archive-folder, so basically it gets extracted to a folder of the same name and the archive file itself is removed afterwards)
- "Extract archive leaving a copy" (does the same bus leaves the archive intact, with a slightly different name i guess)
- "Extract to other location" (opens a dialog to select a folder to extract to)

This would attract both novice and advanced users who are very attached to apps like WinRAR and find Linux-alternatives not very appealing, although their motivations vary. Key here is they attract the user with something specific, such as the colours used in WinRAR archives, and the right click menu had these colours too. I think we shouldn't focus too much on the exact words, by using visual elements you can let users make the proper connection to their windows counterpart without having read a word.

I realise this may not be the ideal place to present this idea. As implementing it would changing both Nautilus and Gnome. Could anyone direct me to where i should file this? Still wanted to post it here, as i think it would solve alot of issues addressed here.