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ROX Desktop Update

Posted by timothy on from the small-simple-swift dept.

tal197 writes: "More than two years since the ROX desktop (a desktop based around the filesystem) was last mentioned on slashdot, the second stable branch of the central ROX-Filer component has just been released. It's still pretty light and fast, despite all the changes, and integrates well with other desktops too."

1 of 181 comments (clear)

  1. Nice for expatriated Mac users by mbrubeck · · Score: 5, Insightful
    I grew up with Macintosh System 6. That was a long time ago; first I jumped ship to BeOS back in the PR1 days and became a bash and vi junkie; later moving to Debian and becoming a free software hacker. For the most part I abandoned my MacOS roots.

    I never managed to shake a nagging feeling of loss: I missed the Finder. Oh, I tried various graphical file managers -- Midnight Commander, assorted OS/2 and NeXT clones, and more recently Nautilus. None of them worked for me; I tried to use them but always found myself switching back to the shell to get anything done. Most recently, I tried MacOS X and had the same problem! My beloved Finder -- constant from System 6 all the way to MacOS 9 -- had been replaced by this strange marriage of Windows Explorer and the NeXT Workspace Manager.

    What did I want that all these tools failed to deliver? A physical feeling of the filesystem. The idea that this directory is here... and this one is over there... and I can reach through the screen with my mouse, scoop up a bunch of files, and drop them in a new location. Also a sense of immediacy. The file manager must be lightweight and optimized enough that opening a new directory is, perceptually, a zero-cost operation. The interface must be sparse enough that you feel you are working in the filesystem, not through a bunch of widgets and menus. Sure, browsers like Nautilus or the OS X Finder support classic Finder-style browsing, but they don't stay out of your way enough for you to ignore the browser and focus on the files.

    The introduction on the ROX pages sums up some of how I feel:

    However, recent desktop efforts (such as KDE and GNOME) seem to be following the Windows approach of trying to hide the filesystem and get users to do things via a Start-menu or similar. Modern desktop users, on Windows or Unix, often have no idea where their programs are installed, or even where their data files are saved. This leads to a feeling of not being in control, and a poor understanding of how the system works.

    One other system managed to give me the same intuitive feel for the filesystem, and that was the Be Tracker, a blatant but well-crafted Finder clone. Despite serious flaws (no hierarchal list views!), it was so nice to use that it was my primary interface into my computer when I used BeOS. The ROX Filer looks like a promising start. I will download it and hope, and contribute where I can.