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The Captains of Nautilus
GonzoJohn writes "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.""
I understand this is an early post, but I've seen that concept elsewhere before. When do you start to care as much about your explorer application as, say, your window manager ? Isn't this whole explorer metaphor quite new to *NIX, and borrowed from win/mac OSes ?
I don't think the gnome community should become as depend on nautilus as windows users are on explorer. It's a nice shell, granted, but it's an app like many others, and many users don't... use it.
My point is, that kind of integration is just not the way to go for desktop on linx. If you want to be recognized, don't follow the (questinable) ideas of others.
Karma cannot be described by words alone.
i'm a 100% linux newbie and need an explorer type file manager. i'm trying to convert to linux but the file and directory structure of linux is so different that it's been difficult to make the switch completely.
Someday programmers will succeed in finding the pot of gold and create a solidly stable yet totally flexible OS and apps that don't contain the bloat long associated with software like Star Office and windows. In the meantime, we "enthusiasts" need to admit that if we really do want to see linux in any of its many versions win the desktop wars, it's going to be because we've won the hearts and minds of the regular "user".
Not everyone wants to do real "admin" type work and many "users" just aren't capable of full fledged "admin" jobs. But the fact that not everyone will ever be an "admin" shouldn't mean those of us who are (or like to think we are) should give up freedom of manipulating the OS/file system/apps to our pleasure. One of the advantages in early linux was that if you survived the challenges of install you had a nice, stable OS that would behave as you wanted - if we could manage to match that flexibility with ease of install and a full compliment of standard apps we'd be well on our way.
Yes, but there is nothing wrong in borrowing an idea as long as it is a good idea
Yes, but I can bet that an application like Nautilus is necessary if you ever want to have a decent market share on the desktop . By decent I mean 10% or more.
I would love to hear from you or someone else what kind of a replacement you can offer for a user-friendly file manager.
I am a KDE user, and I love Konqueror. The little bit I tried Nautilus it looked very good to me too. Being an experienced UNIX user, I do most things from the console, but many times I find myself using konqueror just because it is more efficient for the specific task. For example, a recursive copy of a local directory tree to an ftp server where I also want to rename stuff on the fly.
I guess my point is very simple: regular users (and this means 99% of the potential users) need a powerfull yet user-friendly file manager, or something else that let's them access all kinds of files, open them, copy remove them, manage removable devices and so forth. If you come up with a better metaphore it is more than welcome. Otherwise, GNOME needs to keep going with Nautilus.
The 10th time is something like this:
Given directory foo with the following files:
a.txt
1.hlp
bb.doc
123.wpd
memo to smith
lunch meeting
dog.jpg
cat.gif
homepage.html
Move cat.gif, "memo to smith", bb.doc, and 1.hlp to directory bar.
In a gui, you hold the ctrl key down and it takes about 7 clicks total. From the command line, there's not much you can do to make it fast since the files have nothing in common.
This comes up pretty frequently for end users. For sysadmins the story is different, but most end users don't have files that lend themselves to regular expressions or something that makes the cli efficient. The file names and contents are almost random, so there's no efficient way to group them.
Reading this interview makes me think about just how far in front of Gnome KDE is...
"thumbnailing and autoplay on hover for video would be possible ?"
Autoplay on hover is already in KDE 3.0 and thumbnailinng is in KDE 3.1
"different information under each icon for each type of file is possible (ie pixel size and color depth for images, length in time of audio and video, and so on)"
Once again this stuff is either in KDE 3 or 3.1
"The Icon view is quite integrated with the core Nautilus code at the moment, so it is very hard to do things like this."
This is where we start to see some architectual problems with Gnome. KDE does not suffer from these because everything is very componentized (probably because C++ is fundamentally more componentized itself).
"you can't e.g. write external Nautilus views (e.g. a cvs view) that uses the icon view."
Once again a foundation problem. KDE already has an integrated CVS view in konquerer (it uses the cervisia kpart).
"but designing the right APIs to allow this and not cripple our ability to make changes to the Nautilus internals is very hard"
These apis should have been designed in the first place - BEFORE things got to this point.
"Right now things like Apotheke, the CVS view, have to recreate the whole directory view, which is a pain."
Once again this is where the abundance of kparts comes in handy - just include the directory view part and you are done in KDE.
"the concept of a distinct 'Nautilus Theme' has started to go away in favor of more systemwide theming mechanisms"
Started?? Konquerer has used the rest of the KDE system themes for a LONG time!
"he GTK+ & GNOME file selector is a popular subject both on the GNOME mailing lists and on sites such as gnomesupport.org and gnomedesktop.org. Using Nautilus or subsets of Nautilus for this task"
Once again we see the componentized nature of KDE shining through. Since everything is a kpart - nothing has to be reinvented. KDE has had a standard file dialog box for some time now - and it functions just like konquerer - including theming and icons.
"Another developer requested feature is being able to embed the nautilus fileviews into other applications,"
Me? Beating the dead horse?? Nah....
I really like Gnome - but I use KDE myself (and am a C++ programmer). I wish the Gnome folks lots of luck in catching up with KDE on these issues.
That said - there are other areas in which gnome shines - indeed the desktop is not ALL about the filemanager. Bothe DE's have their ups and downs, I just wanted to point out some of Gnome's downs in reference to the interview.
Derek
Actually, thanks to filename completion in any standard shell, you'll list those files with about 9 keystrokes. Add to that "mv " and whatever the "directory bar" is, and you have accomplished your goal very efficiently. There is no way that I would be able to mouse around that quickly to choose the files and drag them somewhere!
Reality or nothing.
I wasn't going to respond to this, but since it seems to have gotten enough credence to get modded up to a five, it seems I should.
/. are (correctly) ignored by GNOME. People who pour their entire fucking lives into GNOME, like Havoc, get a lot more respect. Flaming him merely proves how ignorant you are.]
GNOME is not being hijacked. Hijacking is when captains and paying passengers are forced by outside forces to go someplace they don't want to go. GNOME is not being forced to go anywhere- the captains- the core maintainers- believe that what GNOME is doing is the right thing. Havoc, Alex, Dave, Jeff Waugh, John Fleck, and tens of other core people believe they are doing the right thing- they wouldn't do it otherwise. Those people have built GNOME with their sweat and tears, and if they feel that a simpler, more usable GNOME is the way to go, then they have every right to take GNOME that way.
Everyone else? All the hitchhikers who haven't given their time to GNOME? It's hard to hijack GNOME from them- if they haven't contributed, it is not their GNOME to take away. But that's the most beautiful part about Free Software. It doesn't matter that they don't like GNOME's direction- it's all still there for them to use, all several hundred thousand lines of it. If you disagree with where GNOME is being 'hijacked' to, there is more than one way to go. Fork it. Or use KDE. Or use GNOME1.4 until the end of time. Or (best option) put your own blood sweat and tears in and fight to make GNOME2 better. That's the option I've chosen, it's the option others have chosen. And I firmly believe it's the best choice I can make.
[Final note: People who post as ACs to
IAAL,BIANLY
Haven't you heard? GNOME and KDE are DE's to cater to normal users.
A quote from the KDE website:
KDE seeks to fill the need for an easy to use desktop for Unix workstations,
similar to the desktop environments found under the MacOS or Microsoft Windows
Now, consider that GNOME was founded to be a KDE replacement based on a free toolkit, and you will understand that GNOME and KDE are not aimed at us. They are aimed at regular users.
Of course, we're still free to use GNOME and KDE, or an xterm and any one of the 100 freely available window managers available for X.
Why do I keep typing pythong?
I guess I'm not surprised by the vitriol here, but I'm really disappointed.
GNOME is still every bit as flexible as it used to be, for the expert user. All the config files are editable, all the gconf keys are available in gconftool, and you can hack your own prefs/themes/etc. You can choose not to run Nautilus easily enough by editing your session files.
If you're an expert, none of the defaults should bother you. Are you merely complaining about this because you don't want to go back to editing config files? Maybe the intermediate user loses a few options, but they can learn, or content themselves with themes and actually getting things done.
The GNOME 2 development process has been going on for quite some time, in the open, on public lists. If you're suddenly upset about the direction of GNOME development, you haven't been paying attention.
And "The GNOME Board and all the developers" isn't exactly a small cabal. These development decisions have been made by large teams of developers after a lot of heartfelt and sincere discussion. Yes, they worried about alienating current users, including developers. Lots of developers like viewports and edge-flipping. Lots of developers want wonky customization.
But they also want stabiltiy, and they want not to have wierd Bonobo bugs that only occur with particular Sawfish settings and are impossible to replicate or fix with any regularity.
What the GNOME 2 development team has done is put in a simple set of defaults that don't confuse the living daylights out of new users. The customization fiends are always going to customize, no matter what, so there's not much point in guessing what customizations they're going to want.
For the expert who knows the difference between one window manager and another, it's relatively simple to switch-- just pop open a terminal and kill one and start the other. But most of us don't care. Really. And after three days of using the new desktop, you won't care either, because it's faster and has fewer bugs and doesn't peg your CPU when you switch desktops.
In other words, get over yourself. GNOME 2 is good and getting better, and you're whining about the way the scene has changed like some hipster who's upset that the rest of the world is now playing your White Stripes records.