Nautilus 1.0.5 Release

mz001b writes: "Proof that just because a company goes out of business does not mean that their open source software goes with them -- Nautilus 1.0.5 has been release. See the LinuxToday notice."

Comments

Perhaps I'll actually be able to run it now

[uchian]

Being a KDE fan, I don't use Gnome, but I check up on it every so often to see if it's reached a state where I might convert - not because I don't like KDE, just that I like to keep my options open and use the desktop which best suits me.

Trouble is, the last couple of times I tried to run Gnome, Nautilus would appear to lock up completely for 30+ seconds at a time.

I don't know why and haven't been interested enough in Gnome to find out why yet. I'll probably give it another try now though, see if it works yet.

Re:Perhaps I'll actually be able to run it now

[Minstrel78]

This is because it's trying to use ESD (esound), which is not configured properly, yet is set to run in the Gnome Control Panel.

Either make esd work right or disable it and nautilus will become very responsive.

I'm tracking debian unstable and i've found it to be acceptibly fast for everyday use on my rather average machine (p3/450) and it has a whole bunch of neat features that I keep discovering :)

changes

[nzhavok]

A full list of changes can be found here

Re:changes

[Spy Hunter]

Some of the changes appear to allow KDE users the option to run Nautilus. My question is why? Why would a KDE user use Nautilus instead of Konqueror?

I'm serious here. I've never used Nautilus. What features does it have that Konqueror doesn't? How do they compare in speed now that all these optimizations have been made?

Re:changes

[fault0]

I'm not exactly sure *why*, but here is what I think about both of them (at the risk of turning this into ANOTHER KDE vs. GNOME post):

features-> konqueror is a bit better, it has some neat features such the embedded terminal frame. Although Nautilus can be used as a web browser, I think that Konqueror does a much better job at it. Also, Konqueror thumbnails more filetypes, afaik, and has a customizable toolbar. I think that the only (relativly) minor features that Nautilus has and Konqueror doesn't is the labeling of files (I don't use that feature), and the zooming of views up to 400% (of course, no one in their right mind would use that).

speed-> konqueror wins against Nautilus 1.0.4, hopefully this new release will have speed improvements (from what I hear, it doesn't). Comparing

eye candy-> I think nautilus wins slightly here. Konqueror 2.2.1 really caught up, but there are small pieces of eye candy missing such as the neat (but slow) selection of Nautilus, and imho, the border in image previews in Nautilus looks nicer than in Konqueror. Perhaps the Konqueror developers can do something like that? (If it decreases performance in any way, DON'T).

So, IMHO, if you are using KDE, use Konqueror. If you are using GNOME, use Nautilus (or GMC).

Re:changes

[YellowBook]

Some of the changes appear to allow KDE users the option to run Nautilus. My question is why? Why would a KDE user use Nautilus instead of Konqueror?

I'm not sure why a KDE user would use Nautilus instead of Konqueror (though perhaps they might just like it)? But my guess is that these changes in Nautilus weren't so much because they really thought a bunch of KDE users would want to run it, but for standards compliance. KDE and GNOME are supposed to meet certain standards for compatability; most of the KDE-related changes in Nautilus seem to be in order to meet these, especially the extended window manager hints spec.

Re:changes

[Glytch]

Because when Opera crashes, it doesn't take down the whole fucking OS with it. Good enough answer?

Re:changes

[fault0]

1. No, I'm not judging based upon slashdot people's comments. It's really a shame that this discussion has become a huge KDE versus GNOME shouting match. I've also installed both on my Athlon 750mhz, and Konqueror seems to load directories much, much faster (and general response of file operations seems to be faster too, such as selecting a bunch of files).

2. It _is_ different. Doing things from the same app is a very nice feature and helps efficiency.

3. I hate to point it out, but browser integration was probably one of the best (and first) innovations that Microsoft really did. Others had the idea to do this before Microsoft did (like Apple with OpenDoc and Cyberdog), but Microsoft was the first to really implement it well. Either way, it really has caught on. As the market share of Netscape went down, this has become a more and more important feature in modern environments. Gradually, "applications" are becoming less important, and what you do with them (the idea of the "document"), is becoming more important. The computer, after all, is a tool. Thus, intregration is best. All in all, taking the best ideas from different operating systems is very good, and I'm disappointed that Eazel chose not to implement this in Nautilus!

Re:changes

[Skeezix]

Couple of points regarding nautilus features. There are several terminal-view components for nautilus that you can choose from. Hopefully soon there will be a central nautilus web page where you can get all these components. Also work is being done now on a galeon nautilus view component--which will go a long way to improving the web browsing experience in nautilus, because we all know how much galeon rocks.

Re:changes

[Skeezix]

Galeon is actually quite speedy. You can also run galeon as a server (-s, --server) which keeps it running all the time and reduces the time of initialization. If you just embed the mozilla embedable you don't get all the features users are used to getting from a web browser. Galeon has a very nice feature set. So you have a couple options. Either you reinvent the wheel in nautilus and rewrite all those features, you go without those features and just have a simple html viewer, or you use component technology to share resources. The last option makes the most since to me. If done properly, you won't take a serious performance hit. Even in its early stages I've observed the galeon web view to actually be faster starting up than the mozilla view. Go figure.

Is it usable yet?

[Tack]

I haven't used Nautilus in a while. I want to like it. I mean, it looks great, that's for sure. But I have been following nautilus-list, and the word is that 1.0.5 is actually slower than 1.0.4. There were some serious performance issues just a few days ago, but Darin Adler made some significant improvements and the others were excited to see that CVS nautilus was only 10% slower (yes, _slower_!) than 1.0.4. (Reference here.) Good enough for a release, apparently, and here we are.

Performance, if you ask me, has to be their #1 priority. There may be fewer bugs, but bugs in software I don't use due to bad performance doesn't affect me any. I have a 1.4Ghz/512MB system and it remains significantly too slow for me to use productively.

I can't help but think of Mozilla about this time last year. It was horridly slow. And the typical tune on slashdot was something like "Mozilla is so slow it's useless garbage! They should scrap it all and start over." And now the tune has changed, and the general opinion about Mozilla is very positive. Given that, maybe in a year or two Nautilus will pick up in performance and reach a state of usability. I hope, anyway!

I can't say myself if Nautilus is really much slower because I haven't used it myself. If anyone has used it, can you post your observations here?

Cheers,
Jason.

Re:Is it usable yet?

[sulli]

I haven't used Nautilus in a while either. And I must have gained at least 15 pounds as a result!

Re:Is it usable yet?

[NonSequor]

1.0.4 works fine for me. A little slow opening the first window (3 seconds by my estimation), but good after that. This is on an Athlon 1000 with 374MB of RAM (I had 128MB before and it ran at the same speed). I use the music view to play all of my MP3s but from time to time that crashes.

I really like using Nautilus to organize my files. I've changed the icons and backgrounds of all of the subdirectories of my home directory to suit my fancy. Certainly this is just fluff, but I like to personalize everything. I use the emblems to mark MP3s that I get from Morpheus. Rather than just deleting low quality MP3s I mark them as being bad and keep them until I find a good replacement. I may eventually write a program that generates a random playlist for my MP3 player, giving songs with a certain emblems higher or lower chances of being picked (I want to listen to my favorite songs more often, but I would like to have others thrown in for variety).

There's still some work to be done though. Sometimes the sidebar tabs die for no reason. The music view crashing also needs to be fixed. If these two things are fixed then I will have no problems with Nautilus.

Re:Is it usable yet?

[WasterDave]

I'm just wondering what Nautilus is *doing* in that 11 seconds it takes to load a folder.

IIRC Monsieur Cox was saying something about loading a font 4700 times. Hmmm.

Dave

Re:Is it usable yet?

[Wolfstar]

Yes, but I think that the overwhelming difference here lies in the current status of the project.

A year ago - heck, even as little as 6 months ago! - Mozilla was sluggish to terrible. The only reason people were using it was because it did a much better job out the gate of handling fonts and images. But the reason for that was simple, and oft-stated by the Mozilla folks.

Debugging code.

Mozilla was still new enough and untried enough that every build they did had debugging code all over the place, so that when the Lizard died, they could get an accurate autopsy right away. And they hadn't even BOTHERED with speed optimizations. As they steadily creep closer to 1.0 - and this is really only since they hit .9 or so that it's become more true - they've been pulling the debugging code and starting to optimize for speed. The difference in performance is incredible, and I've had at least two people tell me that they've gotten better results on unofficial page-loading benchmarks from Mozilla than IE under Win32.

Nautilus, on the other hand, is a shipped product. Sure, no program is ever really ready, it just gets released; that doesn't change the fact that the debug code should be out and the speed optimizations should be in.

If I had to take a guess, I'd imagine that the performance hits Nautilus takes are from trying to be too user-friendly while maintaining a Kitchen-sink toolset.

IANACoder, but that's one of the reasons I don't bother with Nautilus.

Well, that and the fact that Xterm works just fine for my file manager. =)

Re:Is it usable yet?

[GauteL]

It is indeed a bit slower on regular tasks than 1.0.4 (unnoticable).
BUT:
A lot of those not happy with the speed of Nautilus were in fact experiencing some speed-bugs that have been cleared out. So while Nautilus is now overrall a bit slower than 1.0.4, the horrible worst-case behaviour is now much smoother.
Speed is indeed a high priority with the Nautilus-team, but there is always something more important: reliability.

Nautilus 1.0.5 is now in a very usable and reliable state. For most people it should actually be fast enough, but some may still find it on the slow side.

On a 1.4GHz/512MB system it is already very fast. On my 800MHz/256MB system, things work like this:
Staring Nautilus: 7.5 seconds
Opening the first window from blank desktop: 3 secondsOpening second window: 2 seconds
Changing directories: 0.2 - 3.5 seconds (on average around 0.5)*

* The 3.5 seconds is worst case (a directory with ~900 pictures to display pregenerated thumbnails for). Thumbnailing in itself is a seperate thread and async.

This is with all the Bells and Whistles on.

Re:Is it usable yet?

[big.ears]

I don't believe that its the 'kitchen sink' aspect of Nautilus that is causing problems. Examining bugzilla, there are tons of features that were cancelled by Eazel in hopes of getting a product out before their cash ran out. And these are all fairly modular, and so don't impact speed that much. People tend to use the word 'bloat' as a general insult, usually one that doesn't reflect reality. Just because something is slow doesn't mean it's 'bloated' and even if something is 'bloated', it doesn't mean its slow.

I think one reason why nautilus can be unresponsive is the way disk i/o is handled. They attempted to layer the disk handling, so normal functions in the application can't read files directly. There are special request-callback routines that run as their own thread which are required to access file systems. This helps make it easier to deal with different file systems, different platforms, remote file systems, and to make things (like ftp) appear as file systems even if they technically aren't. But, by abstracting a layer, and having the layer be autonomous, things get trickier. Sometimes, designs that encouraged optimal normal behavior produced atrocious worst-case behavior, and sometimes, fixes to address worst-case behavior impacted normal behavior.

So, I think your assumptions are incorrect. Its user-friendly aspects are not impacting its performance as much as some of the nuts-and-bolts infrastructure, but these are getting worked out as well. Hopefully, we'll start seeing more of the document views appearing in the next months (like pdf, ps, targz, .rpm, abiword, etc.)

more interactivity

[Anonymous Coward]

For one (the feature made for me but it doesn't work with .ogg) it allows you to do a mouseover on a .mp3 file and it plays it, when you take the mouse cursor off the .mp3 file it stops playing it.

At least that's how it worked with redhat 6.2. Now I have 7.1 and the latest official Ximian desktop and that don't work anymore for some reason. Perhaps a Redhat 7.2/ and a NEW Ximian Gnome would suffice.

If I can get that working with .ogg support and the speed problem is fixed I will use Gnome and Nautilus more. I think the thing here is they got the ideas working, now the code has to be optimized.

Re:more interactivity

[rikkus-x]

Konqueror does that, and yes, it works with .ogg.
Just enable sound previews (View->Preview->Sound Files)

Any other examples ?

Rik

Re:more interactivity

[uchian]

As an addendum to what I just said, I had a quick look at konqueror and realised that Ogg files didn't preview.

(Incidentally, I don't know if this breaks anything else, so proceed at your own peril)

After a couple of minutes digging, I found out that in KDE Menu -> Preferences -> File Browsing -> File Associations, Ogg was listed as an Application, rather than an Audio mimetype I have read reasons why this is, but the upshot is that they did not preview. To make it preview, I changed it to an audio mimetype.

Just thought I'd pass the knowledge on :-)

Screen Shots?

[sakusha]

Anyone know of some screen shots of the new release? I haven't seen a recent version running, just wondering what it looks like.

I love GNOME, but...

[green pizza]

Prepare to lose all karma...

Perhaps I'm alone... I love GNOME, but I really don't care for Nautilus. In fact, I sort of have a strong distaste for it. But I have to give Andy and company from Eazel credit for taking a risk and for following their dreams. They've made a product that's loved by many... just not me.

Re:Stop complaiing about speed

[Arandir]

Yeah right. If you're trying to make a file manager suitable for the masses you had better make it run tolerably on the masses' hardware. They all have IDE and could care less about what you think.

Re:Its slow because you use a IDE harddrive you du

[dangermouse]

Nautilus runs as fast as Windows does in IDE mode when running on SCSI.

This is a joke, right?

You've posted at least three times that people complaining about Nautilus' speed (or lack thereof) should ditch their IDE drives and go to SCSI.

You might want to jump a little, I'm gonna throw some basic logic at you.

If the Windows file manager runs as fast on IDE as Nautilus does on SCSI, you can make two conclusions: (1) SCSI is not any faster than IDE, and Nautilus is just slower than the Windows FM. (2) SCSI is faster than IDE, and Nautilus is a lot slower than the Windows FM.

Either way, you're not helping your case.

While we're on the subject, you might want to consider that if only one device on the controller is speaking, SCSI has no real advantage over IDE. That means for most desktop systems, which only have one hard drive, IDE is perfectly sufficient and a hell of a lot cheaper. Do your own research: here's the first link I found at google on the subject.

So drop your ridiculous SCSI fetish and recognize that Nautilus is just slow (even according to your own damned post).

Re:OT: OSS profiling tools

[Teferi]

The standard profiling method is to build with -profile (I think) and run gprof on the profile data file running the executable generates.
At least, that's how I seem to remember it.

Re:Stop complaiing about speed

[toxic666]

Yeah, this is what the Linux Desktop movement needs. Just go out and buy expensive hardware and it will be fine!

Yes, the average desktop NEEDS a SCSI RAID controller just to use poorly written code that needs to be compiled on each system.

Take your meds, get a real job supporting a profitable company and then tell me how great it is.

Give some consideration to the reality of supporting applications and systems in a business environment before you post comments that fail to account for sound economic and engineering decision-making principles.

Re:n^2?

[chromatic]

Because sometimes code that works is better than code that doesn't work, but is theoretically O(log n)? Because the n in the O(n^2) algorithm never exceeds a dozen? Because profiling hadn't revealed it to be a bottleneck yet?

It's good to use efficient algorithms, but big-O analysis is rarely the only concern with real-world code.

(I haven't read a whit of Nautilus code. I tried it on my parents' -- midrange -- machine several months ago and immediately moved them back to GMC.)

Re:n^2?

[Tack]

I thought that everyone knew n^2 was a Bad Thing and to avoid it and bubble sorts like the plague. It's not as if it is any effort to use an already written better data structure/sort algorithm that is in some library of which there are hundreds!

I get the impression that you think n^2 strictly refers to sorting algorithms or something. n^2 can refer to a measure of any algorithm's efficiency, and from what I can see in the change log, this case has nothing to do with sorting. [FYI, this may also be written in Big-Oh notation, as in O(n^2) (although note that O(n^2) is not necessarily equivalent to n^2).]

And yes, sometimes n^2 is needed. Sometimes x^n is needed, and sometimes even n! is unavoidable. Maybe you ought to revisit those computer science texts. :)

Jason.

Ditch Nautilus?

[Anonymous Coward]

I am really disappointed in this release. I finished compiling it and ran it, and it about the same speed if not slower than 1.0.4! The nautilus developers should aim to make Nautilus FAST. I don't care about the eye candy, I like my computer to be a tool.

I really think that some people should really extend GMC for some of the features Nautilus implements, such as file previews, and make GMC the default again!

Dependencies from hell

[ikekrull]

I'm not even going to try installing this thing because i know its going to require about 50 supporting libraries to be downloaded just to get it to run.

Re:Dependencies from hell

[styopa]

To be exact, according to dpkg it has 37 dependencies. Of course, those have dependencies also.

I know that I will get flamed for this, but that is why I use Debian GNU/Linux. Figuring out dependencies stops becoming my job.
apt-get update
apt-get install nautilus
Done.

Re:Dependencies from hell

[fossa]

Your point? Are you trying to say that apt is no reason to use debian now that it's been ported to rpm based distros? Now apt rocks, but what sets debian apart from the others[1] in my eyes is the debian policy. Nothing's perfect, but when I install a debian package I have a pretty good idea of what it's going to do and where it's going to install. Some examples are /usr/share/doc/package for every package, every package giving a menu entry to the debian menu system and therefore automatically appearing in the window manager menus, and a strict following of fhs (maybe not strict but at least consitent across packages[2]).

Apt only reaches its full potential when it can be used with confidence, and I can definitely use apt with confidence on my debian box[2]

I'm not dissing other distros. I'm simply stating that in my own experience I feel a confidence with debian that I did not feel with the other distros I've tried. So if one feels safe using apt on debian then apt is most definitely a reason to use debian.

[1] Back in my distro experimenting days, I tried RedHat 5.2, Caldera ?.?, Suse ?.?, RedHat 6.? and debian slink (2.1?). I feel safest installing debian packages and haven't tried another distro since (for better or worse).

[2] At least when I used debian stable. It is unfortunate that debian doesn't release more often. But I have plenty of confidence installing from unstable as long as I'm not upgrading libc or perl.

Re:Stop complaiing about speed

[tzanger]

You run an extremely powerful fancy GUI on a Pentium 4 1ghz on an IDE slow harddrive?!?!?!?!?!

If the damned program chews up enough memory that it has to eat into swap on any of my systems, it's out the window.

In fact, on the laptop I'm typing this on right now, I have turned off the swap drive. My desktop needs should never need more than 256M of memory, ever.

Yes I understand disk access can be slow but that's what the linux cache is all about. I don't have any trouble with Konqueror, Opera or even that pig of an OS...er...browser, Mozilla. If Nautilus hits the drive more than Moz, it's broken, and no amount of you bitching about my IDE drive is going to speed it up.

Slow-NOT!

[SparkyMartin]

I don't find Nautilus slow on my Athlon700 system-not exactly a screamer by todays standards. When running Gnome it opens up in a couple seconds. In KDE it takes three times as long to start but once running I don't notice any lags. I dunno, maybe I'm too use to Windows.

Nautilus vs. Konqueror vs. Windows Explorer

[Anonymous Coward]

I did a quick speed analysis in the loading of a directory with 2870 mp3 with Nautilus (1.0.5), Konqueror (2.2.1), and Windows Explorer (XP).

all 3 apps were already running, but never visited directory before (so no caching). test done on athlon 800 with 256 mb ram. Everything was set to order by name.

Windows Explorer - loaded new window and loaded files almost instantenously.
Konqueror - open new window was instant.. loading files took about 4 seconds.
Nautilus(icon view) - open new window was instant.. loading files took 28 seconds, 4 more seconds for the GUI to finish layouting.
nautilus (music view) - still loading, has been over 10 mins, gui usable, but the view part isn't (using bonobo?). incomparision, xmms, winamp, and noatun load metadata from mp3s much faster.

looks like nautilus is 32 times slower than Windows Explorer. Much optimization has to be done!

Re:Nautilus vs. Konqueror vs. Windows Explorer

[cr@ckwhore]

Interesting analysis... in Windows Explorer, did you compare against the "thumbnail view"? I believe the "thumbnail view" is roughly equivalent to Nautilus' concept of previewing each document instead of an icon. Its a great idea, just needs to be a *lot* faster!

Re:Nautilus vs. Konqueror vs. Windows Explorer

[infiniti99]

What I hate about Nautilus (and other Linux file managers, for that matter, this ain't just a Nautulus problem) is that it tries to launch files upon clicking them once.

I believe this is to get us away from the old double-click paradigm. You won't double-click anywhere in KDE (except maybe in a listview widget like from Licq). If you want to make Konqueror behave more like Windows Explorer, try disabling single-click launch and "change cursor over icons" (that hand thingy). Now if only it were faster..

Re:OT: OSS profiling tools

[gkatsi]

http://www.mozilla.org/performance/jprof.html (jprof)
http://www.mozilla.org/performance/eazel.html (eazel profilers that mozilla guys use)
http://oprofile.sourceforge.net/

of the three, I believe that jprof and oprofile work on the same principle, only oprofile is system-wide and comes with a kernel module.

for debugging, there are tons of malloc replacements (which may or may not require recompilation) besides electricfence. Obviously, I have no idea what other things boundschecker or purify can do, but I'm sure there must be a tool for most pieces of functionality that these programs provide (but not necessarily all at once).

Re:Nautilus is a bloated piece of shit

[Glytch]

Windowmaker is like the girl next door that you keep coming back to because she's the perfect balance. Gnome is like the horny divorcee who's desperate for company and tries in vain to make herself look good. KDE is the preppy bitch cheerleader who requires way too much upkeep to keep happy. KDE also runs with a different crowd, calling themselves QTs, who are convinced of their own superiority.

And Opera kicks Konquerer's ass. As long as I'm pissing off the eyecandy freaks, I'll piss off the purity zealots too.

Gotta use it awhile to appreciate it

[flacco]

If your'e still using GMC, try Nautilus for awhile - it will grow on you (please, clever punster wags, control yourselves).

I especially like the ability to have remote FTP file systems integrated with the file manager alongside local storage, so I can cut a file from local drive and just paste it into an FTP site. Can't wait till they get SMB file shares and other filesystems added to it as well.

Combine this with the bookmarks feature and you have a very efficient way of managing remote and local files transparently. It's worth a few seconds startup time IMHO.

Re:Gotta use it awhile to appreciate it

[Iggy]

> Can't wait till they get SMB file shares and other filesystems added to it as well.

You can already browse SMB shares, but you need to get the gnome-vfs-extra package from somewhere. If you are happy with CVS then get it from the GNOME CVS server, otherwise, have a hunt around for a package for the distro you are using.

One limitation is that to browse stuff you need to enter the username and password into the URI eg.

smb://user:password@sharename

But it's a minor quibble.

I don't use nautilus or need to browse SMB shares so the information is coming from memory having read the nautilus mailing list archives...

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:OT: OSS profiling tools

[Paul Komarek]

Build with -p if you wish to analyze with prof (I've never done this), or -gp if you want to analyze with gprof. Then learn how to use prof or gprof. Learning to use gprof is a good investment for your time. The only difficult part is correctly interpreting the analysis returned by gprof, which is very detailed. It's not that bad, but it can be daunting at first.

Or you can use the old "ctrl-c" profiling method: run the program in a debugger, and stop it at random times with ctrl-c. Each time, make a note of which function you interrupted. If one function shows up a lot, then optimizing it is probably your best bet for improving performance.

I prefer gprof. =-)

-Paul Komarek

Naming

[Ed Avis]

With hindsight, it was probably a bad idea to choose a company name only two letters away from Edsel.

(Or Etzel which is German for Edsel... == Attila, BTW.)

The linux desktop

[Anonymous Coward]

What's with the ever evolving state of file managers for linux? Besides thumbnail view and an embedded audio player MS has had the same file manageer since 1995 and it works fine. Only now with XP does it look even slightly different. Yet the linux ones want to be web browsers etc and can't even do that right. A file manager should do one thing, manage files. These "file managers" are constantly changing and can never settle on a feature set. Talk about feature creap. It slices, it dices, it does ftp,http, nfs, smb, blah, blah. Did you know the "desktop" audience the linux community thinks it deserves for the most part does not even know how to use a file manager? They just use file->save as to put the file where they want.

There are soo many more important issues for the linux desktop than a SUPER file manager. How about the linux commmunity spend a few years making or copying there OWN GOOD LOOKING FONTS? I can't imagine it could take as long as Gnome has and would truly benefit the community as a whole as opposed to a bloated file manager. The linux community for all their push behind open standards has none when it comes to the linux desktop. Linux hackers do what Feels good and as a result you have a bunch of patch work windows managers that fight with each other and need P500's with 256MB ram to run O.K.

I'm sure I just don't "get it" but it seems to me that simple and stable seem to be the future for Computer desktops, and linux is way off track.

What is the role of nautilus?

[jhdsl]

I wonder what the role of nautilus is? It is not a very good file browser, it can't browse tar-archives like its predecessor midnight commander could. You can not drag images from thumbnail mode into another window to get it displayed. It is not a very good browser either, you can't for instance drag links to another window, no image control, no "open new window on middle mouse click".

The playing of sound files by just pointing at them is neat, but doesn't work in 1.0.5 for me (it did in 1.0.4).

I think it is strange that Gnome replaced MC with something that can't even do all the stuff MC did. And as a web broswer it is not up to galeon or mozilla or konqurer. If one wants to be sarcastic one could say that they took two programs, MC and mozilla, integrated them and in the process removed a lot of useful stuff. The eye-candy is impressive for about two minutes, but then what?

Nautilus seems to be stuck in this not-ok-file-manager-not-ok-browser state.

I'm no big fan of KDE but at least konqurer is an ok filemanager and an ok browser. Nautilus is not really usable in any role.

One really good point to advertize

[einhverfr]

Eazel went out of business because they had a shitty business model. But their flagship project lives on and may be a success yet. So what does this matter?

It shows consumers that open source projects are not tied to the success of their parent companies. This is extremely important when it comes to the ASP businesses. My message to them is: escrow your code or open it up if you want my business. I want to make sure that if an ASP I contract with goes under, I still maintian access to MY data.

Nautilus.

[miguel]

For a long time I stuck to GMC as my desktop manager, because I figured someone had to run it if we planned on keeping people with small systems happy (there are a lot of under powered machines out of the US).

I finally made the switch because of the simplicity and cleanliness of Nautilus. I did not like Nautilus 1.0, I felt there were too many taste differences between my way of working and Nautilus way of working.

But the Nautilus hackers were quick to respond to the input of the user community, and by the time Nautilus 1.0.3 came out, they had addressed most of the community issues.

Today people are using Nautilus in really creative ways, and I finally made the switch because of all this creativity. Tuomas has a `magnets' package for his desktop and a set of images to play free-form solitaire on the desktop. Sure, they are just toys, but like that there are hundreds of other things being done with Nautilus.

The core foundation in Nautilus is sound, and a lot of people are doing really creative things. For example someone wrote a "3D" viewer for directories. You can at any point switch your default view into 3D-view inside the window. It is just a Bonobo component, you do not even need to touch the Nautilus code to add these third-party views.

Some other people have been writing Nautilus scripts, and I have been using a few of them. They could use some polish, but for being user-contributed things, they are pretty nice.

I also noticed that the new Windows XP shell incorporated various ideas that were in Nautilus or earlier versions of Nautilus and some others were demoed as concepts by Andy as potential services to consumers.

I would like to extend's Andy's idea of "actions" that are available on the left pane to be more comprehensive as it is on XP.

Other features in Nautilus are its support for SVG-icons. Something that has been overlooked for some time. I did not knew about this until I saw someone's desktop with these huge icons (common used things were huge, others were there just for reference). Those huge icons looked perfect (maybe they were 100x100 size), when I asked I found out that it was the new Tuomas/Jakub set of SVG icons.

Many hackers have been using pictures of themselves as their desktop "home". For example Nat's personal home directory has a `Friends' directory, and each `Friends' folder has a high resolution picture of his friends, where he keeps his information. He has a picture of his car for details about his car. Maybe he can post a screenshot of his desktop so you get an idea.

There are many more creative uses of Nautilus out there, but I have to say that as the product matures, more and more options are available.

But Nautilus overall makes for a terrific file manager, but it takes some time to get the best out of it.

I still want to see some of Andy's experimental code that allowed live objects to be shown in Nautilus. At some point I saw someone's desktop contain various "web sites" in a folder. Instead of using an RSS feed, various mini-web sites (fully functional) were embedded into a directory. I wish someone could send me a link to this url.

Miguel.