“The official GNOME filemanager Nautilus was originally developed by Eazel as part of their plan to bring usability and beauty to the Unix desktop. Today Nautilus is maintained by veteran GNOME hackers Alexander Larsson and Dave Camp. Being such a core application in the GNOME desktop it is the topic of many discussions in and around GNOME. In a recent survey on gnomedesktop.org an interview about Nautilus was at the top of the wishlist. So to let everyone get the inside scope on what is happening with Nautilus currently I got hold of Alexander and Dave for a small interview.”
was a good read and made sense…
no new feature or patchs for Nautilus antil its speedy and stable.
Cool
Nex6
Personally I think besides the speedincrase, Nautilus 2 doesn’t differ much from Nautilus 1. It somehow doesn’t feel really usable or really integrated into the GNOME Desktop.
Here, have a good read!
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/nautilus-list/2002-October/msg00052….
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/nautilus-list/2002-September/msg0009…
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/nautilus-list/2002-July/msg00301.htm…
While the majority use KDE as a desktop manager I prefer Gnome 2 (not 1.4). Nautilus has very much become a definite part of my desktop, and it doesn’t stand out. I think the opposite, it’s integration has been surprisingly outstanding. It isn’t as integrated as Konqueror is to KDE, but that’s mainly why I’m a Gnome user, it leaves more room to customize those fugly features out of your UI.
i read that link some hours ago:
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/nautilus-list/2002-September/msg0009…
if this is the future for nautilus then good bye. if alex really wan’t to make nautilus as sucking as he describes there then i see no real future for using GNOME.
OO based design, that is in the future. you can’t manage files anymore, you deal with objects.
e.g. you have a CD-ROM icon on the nautilus window and access the stuff on a CD-ROM. you have a PHOTO icon laying on your desktop and get your images folder popped up, you don’t know where that folder is and how it looks. you don’t see any of your homedir anymore or deal with these things. everything is hidden from the user. you as user don’t have the right anymore to decide wether you want to browse your homedir or not because the user shouldn’t know about these things.
this is quite poor! if people really gonna happen to like such feature then i can’t help it. i understand that GNOME should become an easy desktop but why should it become a sucking desktop ?
if the target is the ‘untechnical users’ then my reply here is that nontechnical users don’t know what linux is in general and probably don’t want to deal with it. they probably stay on windows. people that decide to use a linux or *nix like system are technical oriented and want to have full power for their system. most of them probably don’t use a desktop like GNOME. probably they use a WM like BB or WM but those that use GNOME or KDE are those that want full control of linux/*nix and they want a working desktop to get work done.
So what’s your point? That Nautilus should be object oriented or that it should be abandoned cause non-technical users don’t use linux (according to you)?
Errrr, “*shouldn’t* be object oriented” (Sorry, I make those mistakes too often nowadays)
Dekkard, my point is that GNOME in general is moving in a bad direction. and no, i hate the OO idea for nautilus. linux and unix in general are an expert system. if you want all these macos features then linux or unix are the wrong plattforms for making such a desktop environment. but now you could say ‘hey use something else then, no one forces you’. my answer is you are right but the problem is going deeper into other projects too e.g. a lot of libraries that are not necessarily tied to gnome are dealing with gnome configuration systems like pkgconfig now even xfree86 got a lot of gnome material inside their CVS repositry and i fear the idea that everything is evolving into a big mess. if gnome wants to go their way then ok, but please leave the hands out of other projects that are not tied to gnome.
Sorry, but I don’t get you at all:
Making something OO has no relationship to copying Mac OS or Windows. If you mean ease of use… well, that’s a matter of taste. But Gnome is clearly aiming for being easily usable. If you’re a technical user, you have the terminal, ROX, etc etc.
That’s why your final line seems totally out of place: what most non-Gnome applications use are the GTK libs. Is Nautilus included in GTK? no. Then, what’s the meaning of “if gnome wants to go their way then ok, but please leave the hands out of other projects that are not tied to gnome.”. If they are not tied to Gnome to start with, what influence can have Gnome on them? It’s not like they have a hold on some weird license or something. I don’t know if you’re trying to point something out, but I for sure don’t get it.
If you don’t get me then don’t reply! i think i clearly stated my points.
As far as I can tell, it hasn’t been written yet.
But if I wanted to write it, and don’t know C or C++ or anything, where should I start?
Joey said:
>Personally I think besides the speedincrase, Nautilus 2 doesn’t differ much from Nautilus 1.
I beg to differ. In Nautilus 1 it took almost 10 seconds to open some of the directories on my machine.
Now, it takes about 3 for most directories. Yes, it takes nearly five seconds from the doubleclick to I clearly see the rendered thumbnails on a directory full of images.
Actually on my machine with KDE 3.0.2 running Konqueror 3.0.2 of course it takes Konqueror from 5 to 7 seconds on most directories even with thumbnailing and such turned off.
I have heard this in a couple of places about how Nautilus is still slow and I really do not understand it. Gnome 2.0 is still lacking some features that KDE has but it is damn fast, even the much hated Nautilus.
BTW, I am running SuSE 8.0 with stock 2.4.18 kernel running on a 800MHZ Celeron.
You quoted my thread — What the hell is wrong with Nautilus? thread. Everyone gave me hell over the subject but everyone read the damn thing. I should have used a different subject.
If you like Gnome pissing off Luis Villa and Alexl is not really a good thing if you want to be involved in the community.
Personally, I like GNOME 2.0, but not Nautilus. Sure, it feels faster, but that’s not my problem with it. I’m too use to a lot of Konqueror features that when I use GNOME, I rather waste memory to use Konqeuror.
Plus, I’m only using GNOME 2.0 until I feel KDE 3.1 is stable enough for me to use. KDE 3.0 is good, but it feels extremely old. 3.1 fixed a lot of my issues with it.
I don’t see why OO wouldn’t actually benefit technical users. Some of its features it would bring
– Faster development. If you read the interview, you would notice they are finding it hard to add features and fix bugs because of its non-OO design. With OO, development is much much more faster.
– Speed increases. Features that you don’t use don’t have to be executed, I really believe that is a significant speed increase because of this.
But for current Nautilus users – this would be a overall improvement. Adding features and fixing bugs in a much more faster way would greater benefit all.
Then on your technical users with Linux comment. Most technical users on Unix and Linux don’t care if an app is OO or not. Heck, the very fact they are using Nautilus is that they want something easy to use. Otherwise, the terminal would be their obvious choice.
Nautilus original and current goal is to make Linux for easier to use. Not so technical users would feel happy with their system.
What does ease of use have to do with OO? Take a look at the message you sent. What you are complaining against is the Navigational Metaphor, not the OO Metaphor. So don’t bash Dekkard when it seems you don’t know what you are talking about.
Personally, I think this is a step in the right direction.
Nautilus is the most useless filemanager I’ve seen.
Great to look at , useless to use.
Someone please make “gonqueror”. (Gnome version of Konqueror)
Tell us how it is useless. I find it less “klunky” and much faster than konqueror.
I just got home from the uni, so I’ll try to be brief.
Joey is a troll. He doesn’t have a clue about Objects, Gnome or anything. He just wants to say the “Gnome is going the wrong way” line. Sound familiar?
Perhaps I’m wrong, but there was a troll here in OSNews that changed nicks many times, impersonated good old Spark, etc etc and used the same points (mailing lists messages, gnome is wrong, gnome will rape your daughters, etc etc). You get what I’m thinking, right?
If his domain name is the same as Spark, I’ll have no doubt. But I don’t need to waste time to confirm he’s the troll I think (he’s a troll anyway). Anyway, I’ll give some clues so he doesn’t think I just don’t know what to say and bashed him away:
According to your pessimistic view about an OO Nautilus, an user won’t see his homedir, etc etc. Now, can’t there be an instance of the class “directory” with the properties of your homedir? Do you know ANYTHING about objects? no? then please go to sleep.
Now, you say Gnome is going wrong and more projects are using it… contradiction anyone? Or it’s just that you hate Gnome?
pkgconfig is not part of gnome. I HIGHLY doubt that Xfree is using Gnome specific code, cause it’s totally independent of KDE, Gnome, XFCE, etc etc. If you don’t know what you’re talking about, ask, get information, get your points straight and then talk.
And if you try to troll… try to do it better, you have no future as a troll if you don’t improve.
Good bye
Listen with the new performance increases I feel that Nautilus has some real potential.
Things to like about Nautilus:
1. Emblems are a great concept. It helps in identifying files and folders quickly. They are little icons superimposed over the primary icons.
2. Notes in the sidebar. Nobody talks about this and I feel the general consensus is that they are hardly used. I use them however all the time. I put notes about progress of projects and status of different files in them, very useful.
3. Very extensible. Any program made for gnome can have a nautilus view and this is really useful. For example I browse with a Galeon view out of Nautilus many times. I can view folders as CVS repositories in a CVS view. The music view is just cool not real benefit just neat as the gstreamer view is at this time.
4. Scripts. This is the main reason I use Nautilus. Any script that you can run against a file or a folder can be put in your scripts folder and you can run on a file or folder with a simple right click. Honestly, in a good mime system, this would not be needed I guess, but this is far more convient in many ways. No initial set up of dozens of actions through some mime-handling tools just get the script in the scripts folder and go.
There are many problems or features missing too though.
No browsing through archives. Yes, I wish the file-roller folks would make a Nautilus view for this but they are not.
No network neighborhood framework and samba browsing in general is brain dead since there is no place to save settings for it.
No snap to grid features.
Double buffering so moving windows around looks smooth.
Reintroduction of the search facility in some shape or form. Emulating easy with a script.
The ability to right click a file and send it out as an attachment through the gnome default mailer. Easy to emulate through a script.
The ability to right click on a ps, pdf or text file and send those files directly to the printer. Easy to emulate through a script.
So what’s your point? That Nautilus should be object oriented or that it should be abandoned cause non-technical users don’t use linux (according to you)?
While I don’t agree with most of what ‘Joey’ is saying, I do have some things to say in relation to what was said in that mailing list message.
The first thing that comes to mind is that using the term object oriented in this case isn’t quite right, it causes (at least for me) too much confusion between object oriented programming (which most of Gnome seems to be moving towards, if not having been the primary focus of Gnome from the start) and this so-called ‘object oriented metaphor’ discussed in the posted message.
The second thing is why the object metaphor and the navigation metaphor can’t co-exist. The way in which the object metaphor is described seems to be a step back in terms of file management, but is preferred by some users. In Windows that style of file management is still available (it’s much like the file management in Win95, you can disable the location bar in newer versions of Windows and make new windows open when you change directories, which is the behavior of the explorer file manager of Win95), even though Win98 and newer use a navigational system for explorer windows.
Treating the file system as a set of objects should open up your possibilities for viewing the system, not limit it to a strict object metaphor (and I’m not quite sure that the description correctly describes an object metaphor, either). Most of us got sick of closing windows which were simply intermediate steps in navigation from point a to point c a long time ago, and that’s the reason that the ‘navigation metaphor’ is predominant in today’s file managers. Unless you make some serious changes to the way the file system is navigated (ie you remove the need to go through directory levels to get to files, which seems to lead to search-based file management), you are still navigating through the file system, even if you’re opening a new window at each level and representing (visually) directories and files as objects.
Essentially, I think if Nautilus follows the route outlined in that particular message, they’ll find themselves with a file manager very similar to Explorer in Win95, and they’ll end up with a lot of people simply merging the old features back into it to make it useful for themselves. Perhaps this will help to remove some of the cruft on the existing file manager, but it’s a bit of a long way to go about doing that. Of course, I could be missing something fairly important in the whole discussion and they could end up with something fairly revolutionary, but what’s described there doesn’t appear to do that.
>Tell us how it is useless. I find it less “klunky” and much >faster than konqueror.
After adjusting the preferences so it doesn’t do any fancy things, opening a directory with 1541 files took 25 seconds in
konqueror, and Nautilus took 37.(gnome 2.0 vs kde 3.0.1)
However, I complain about the lack of features, e.g. one
cant split windows. And open a file in a not preconfigured app is not fun. What about the sidebar ? Only shows the local dirtree there. Basically Nautilus feels for me a step back to when I used windows explorer.
Gentoo(the filemanager),gmc and Konqueror are far better if you ask me.
>After adjusting the preferences so it doesn’t do any >fancy things, opening a directory with 1541 files took 25 >seconds in
>konqueror, and Nautilus took 37.(gnome 2.0 vs kde 3.0.1)
Funny thing as I posted above I had the exact opposite experience with Gnome 2.0.2 and KDE 3.0.2.
It is odd but might be explainable since I built my Nautilus from source as opposed to using the packages available.
The mime handling complaint is quite real and the handling is a step back from 1.4 Gnome. At least there I can add, delete and modify mime entries in a decent fashion. This is being worked on right now.
One thing has not entered the discussion and probably should. Whether or not, distros are shipping with Gnome2 stuff people should at least keep in mind that these are developer releases no Gnome2 release has been tagged as a true user release yet. I think that is Gnome2.2.
Am i the only one who uses Konqueror in Gnome????
Well, Nautilus is the official file manager for Gnome, that’s why it’s related to Gnome. Of course, you can use any other program you like
Nautilus should have never become the default file manager for GNOME.
If you read comment #13, you would see me using Konqui on GNOME 2.0 too. Mainly for feature purposes.
@ By Dekkard (IP: —.ual.es) – Posted on 2002-10-23 11:52:50
Hello Dekkard, I don’t know who you are but I don’t like beeing called a TROLL by people that I don’t know of. You must feel yourself really powerful to reply with this bad attitude. Maybe you go to http://www.gnomedesktop.org/ and read the Nautilus comment there. There are a lot of people under different IP’s replying more or less the same things.
btw: If you can’t tell who I really am and start making such speculations in an openforum then you should better be careful. My real name is Joey Spantonidis and I life in germany.
As I said before, I don’t care if you are him. Funny thing, you use the same “@ someone” thing he used. But think what you want.
And if you still can’t say something true about why Gnome is wrong, there’s nothing here to discuss.