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

changes

[nzhavok]

A full list of changes can be found here

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.

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?

[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?

[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: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: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: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 :)

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.

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

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.

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.