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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.
Ever since the release of GNOME2 threads of rebellion have surfaced in the community over the increased emphasis on corporate users over experienced GNOME users. Havoc, 'The point about corporate users is that they don't install the OS, or install their own hardware, or have to configure NFS mounts, etc. There's an admin to sort that stuff out.' This emphasis has lead to the removal of much of the flexibility inherant in GNOME2's predecessor. The fruits of this change have begun to surface, here, and here, and here.
Apparently, according to top GNOME developer Havoc Pennington, linux users are not Real Users^TM. Havoc, 'The only way to collect input from real users instead of Linux enthusiasts is to do user testing. We can't do user testing for every decision.'
Oh, God, NO! Please don't compare the "whole explorer metaphor" to Mac OS. Finder is the most efficient (IMHO) file management system and perfected in Mac OS X. Windows Explorer and its red-headed stepchild, Nautilus, don't even come close. I've tried them both and they put up barriers to file management with bells and whistles that get in the way of what users really are doing with their files -- copying, moving, deleting, searching, locating and transfering.
Hop over to a CompUSA or an Apple Store and give Finder a spin and you will see the difference.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Although I understand the need for the newbie user, I've never understood why Nautilus is so important to the initiated GNOME user. I very rarely have a need to use a graphical file manager, and when I do, I'd prefer one that wasn't buggy as snot and slower than tar. No matter what version I've tried, its always had problems. I don't believe I've ever been actively using it for more than a few minutes where it hasn't crashed (don't even bother on Solaris...) Its new and large, so I understand it will take a while, but I don't know that it is ready to have a central role in GNOME.
Yes, its nice eye candy, but how much is it actually used, aside from showing new users that you can drag and drop and preview just like Explorer?
I find Konqueror more usable, but it still seems like an afterthought. On both KDE and GNOME, the whole Desktop Icons and Folders scheme seems so out of place -- like a bad impulse no one should have acted on. I'm not anti-Nautilus, I just don't know that the whole GUI file manager application is as important as people make it out to be.
I'm not flaming, just wondering if anyone else doesn't feel the same.
Don't blame me, I get all my opinions from my Ouija board.
"In a recent survey on gnomedesktop.org an interview about Nautilus was at the top of the wishlist."
Yeah, as in, "I wish it was usable."
(Relax, kidding... kind of)
Don't blame me, I get all my opinions from my Ouija board.
I've run GNOME 1.4 on my 166 pre-MMX with 80mb ram under some different Linuxes and BSDs, and if you make your own .xsession and just start what you want, it isn't bad at all. Did you know that GNOME is also customizable? Never tore into customizing more than the panel, I'm an fvwm2 guy...
:( ) I don't know if this is something that has been fixed, or if the developers would say 'Don't run it as root you dummy'...
On Nautilus, the only thing that I have run into (16 or 18 month old release) is that if for convenience I want to launch Nautilus as root, it can eat FAT32 partitions for breakfast (now I can only see the partition from Linux
Look, if you need to drag and drop files (organize that mp3 collection), it's a real nice tool...
At the end of the article, when asked about what they are looking forward to in Gnome 2.2...
.org, as correctly linked above.
Dave: I'm also looking forward to seeing some apps beginning to mature. Galeon2 is one of the ones I'm waiting eagerly for, and Rhythmbox would be nice to have too."
They got the link to Rhythmbox wrong. Should be
Just when I get used to KDE or Gnome, get it all working, they change it, and break it. Gnome panel used to sit on my minimal fvwm2 desktop, and worked fine, till one day it wouldn't redraw till you moused it, and with Gnome2 it just didn't have the applets I liked anymore. KD3 worked, and then all the fonts went ape with SuSE81.
I now have fvwm2, cpuload for a CPU meter, asmix for a volume control and wmcalclock for a clock/calendar, and they're sweet, small, I can build from source in two minutes, and they work.
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.
I've been using Nautilus2 in Redhat 8.0 for a while now, and I really can't find nothing but positive comments about it. It loads and works fast, it looks great, and in my oppinion, it has a lot of usability. I haven't seen it crash once yet.
My only problem is: I really like to Microsoft idea (argh, flamewar ohoy?) of having the browser integrated into the filemanager. Just type in an http url, and you're on the net. No need to launch an other app. Anyone knows if they're planning to impliment Mozilla into Nautilus2?
I know about gtkhtml, but it really sucks, and isn't even supposed to be a real web browser. It is only supposed to view non-complicated html pages.
My 0.02$.
I prefer having windows launch in seperate windows. KDE takes 3 full seconds to instantiate and Nautilus takes 2. This is on a P4. Is it just me, or is this someone instrinsic to the programs? If it is the setup, what's going on?
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
...but nautilus is WAY too slow for serious use. It uses tons of memory, CPU and is just beyond comprehension as to why it's so slow.
For as long as I can remember, I've tried it off and on hoping that it's gotten better. While I must say it's stability has slowly been increasing it's speed seems marginal at best. I'm sorry, but a GUI file manager should be plenty fast on a PII/333 dual CPU all SCSI system. The fact that it's not makes it pretty much a joke at worse and an odd experment at best.
I've not tried Gnome 2 nor the nautilus efforts on Gnome 2 so I will be giving that a chance. Nonetheless, I'm certainly not holding my breath! When they make it perform reasonably on low-end systems (which I don't consider a dual PII/333 to be), only then will it be considered anything more than a curious toy.
but hate the speed. If you have several files in a directory, Naut is unusable. When in linux I have two windows shares mounted. One is my mp3's, the other is docs and downloads. Trying to browse them with Naut is a non-starter. The same directories under Konq work fine and come up instantly.
Like I said, I do like Naut, but until it speeds up about a 1000% when browsing remote directories it will never have a place on any PC I use.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Captain Nemo, I've always respected what you've done under the sea. You've made it safe from Nazis and Mermen alike!
All hail Nemo, Captain of Nautilus!
http://rox.sourceforge.net
On the GNOME2 prefs thing, yeah yeah, it's a hot issue. Personally, I found GNOME1.4 to be a hideous mess, and love the clean feel of GNOME2. But when somebody is pleased with something, they don't go around flaming people do they, so they don't get any attention (i was a convert from kde3)
Some peoples issues, in case this whole trollfest passed you by:
The lack of preferences: GNOME2 had a lot of stuff removed. Most of it was pointless bloat, BNC binary clock anybody? Some of it were features that were valued by their users, but were so called "crack" features as far as the gnome2 developers were concerned, ie they existed purely to satisfy a tiny minority of people. The theory went that so called "crack" options (a good example would be the, please break my clipboard again pref in KDE3) were ususally just to either work around bugs, or to make up for the fact that some people had got used to a behaviour that actually made no sense. Every pref has a cost in terms of UI bloat, so they were removed.
Some such prefs will get back in to gnome2. If people can make a convincing case for bringing them back (and "well I liked it" is not classed as convincing) then they could well be brought back. But they don't want the fast and clean v2 to regress to the bag of bloat that was 1.4
GConf. I dunno why people poke this so much. For those who don't know, it's kind of like a registry. Unfortunately the word "registry" is a loaded term, because only Windows has ever had one, and the Windows registry really sucks. GConf is not like that. For starters, the keys are all documented, and they are all stored in text files in your home directory (i believe xml by default). It's well organized (mostly). No, it doesn't need a daemon, it's just most apps use it because that means the configuration and the app can be logically separate - ie you can reconfigure an app while running not just from the config panel, but also from the command line, the GConf editor, a remote machine etc. I think GConf is a great idea, and I wish more apps used it, but it is misunderstood a lot. Another reason that it's used is so that you can have "power user prefs" without bloating the UI, the theory being that power users can use the GConf editor. It works quite well really.
Metacity: unfortunately even I (and I generally think the gnome people have the right idea) think Havoc goes too far. Metacity is very, very "thin" indeed. Although it's not true he doesn't implement any new features, the problem is only stuff that's basically very useful to everybody gets in. Other stuff, stuff that's useful only to perhaps some people (like people who find minimize animations irritating) are ignored. Havoc says "if you want to switch off the animation, there's probably something wrong with the animation", and he's right, there is something wrong which is that it's ugly and slow. But some people on the bug commented that "no matter how fast it is, I'd still find it irritating", but Havoc won't even accept patches others have written to add a GConf key! Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of Havocs work esp wrt to freedesktop.org standards, but Metacity does need to grow a bit - the far superior window management of Linux to pretty much anything else is actually a selling point I've found when talking to Windows/Mac users.
Attitude of the developers: the GNOME2 developers have (un)fortunately decided that they are not writing a desktop for geeks, Rasterman can do that, they are writing a desktop for non-geeks. As such, they sometimes come out with comments like "normal users would never need that feature, so it's just bloat" (I'm paraphrasing). As you can imagine, most of gnomes users believe that they as real users are more important than some imaginary, potential users in the future, and big flamage results. I'm not going to comment either way, as it's true that a big problem with Linux usability is the "by geeks, for geeks" mentality, but it's also true that projects that don't listen to their users ..... are what? Are pointless? Will die? I don't know.
As for Nautilus - well, I'd rather they dropped it and used ROX which has the advantage of not being originally written by idiots, very fast and doesn't kowtow to Explorer. It's the sort of thing you could embed. For many of the current gnome users though, they (like me) just use the command line - the real Linux answer to Explorer. Stuff like Konqui and Nautilus are perhaps best thought of as training wheels.
"and I really can't find nothing but positive comments about it."
Shall I collect some for you? They are all from this article.
"...but nautilus is WAY too slow for serious use."
"but hate the speed."
"Bloatware"
"Nautilus is the biggest bloat this side of Redmond."
"I'm sorry but in my 'performance' experience Nautilus was slow as hell not to mention unstable."
"but Nautilus is pretty damn slow."
And that's just the top of the iceberg.
Oh BTW, about the integrated browser: Galeon 2 provides a Nautilus 2 view. It works pretty well.
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
Regarding the button order, it was originally "Cancel" and "Ok" when the mac first came out. This fits with the notion of western culture that going to left is "going back" or "stopping" and going to the right is "moving ahead". Brake pedal is on the left, gas on the right; turn a screw to the right to go ahead and put it in, turn to the left to go back and take it out; when you go back in time, the watch hand goes to the left, when time progresses, you go to the right.
Unfortunately, when microsoft released windows, they switched around the button order on purpose to avoid lawsuits from apple (fat lot of good that did them). Their interface change effectively violated the very way that most people (who speak english) have thought about how stuff works for thousands of years.
The KDE people, being clueless command-line nerds (they still can't understand why the need to use the word "folder" instead of "directory" in their file dialog) who thought they could do GUI stuff, blindly and stupidly copied microsoft. GNOME people, being KDE wannabes who didn't appreciate the Trolltech license, blindly and stupidly copied KDE. Good artists create, great artists steal, bad artists steal crap. (And the ignorant Free Software Person will say "But they're microsoft. They have billions of dollars which they must be spending on usability research and they wouldn't have 95% of the market share if they made unusable stuff. They must know what they're doing." And I respond "But they're microsoft. They have billions of dollars which they must be spending on security research and they wouldn't have 95% of the market share if they made insecure stuff. They must know what they're doing.")
The one and only one thing I applaud the GNOME folks for is moving the button order back to the way it originally was and stealing back the interface from a long legacy of techies who told usability experts to fuck off and die and then tried to pawn off their unusable crap as "perfectly ready for the desktop".
If we could only alienate those people just a little more, perhaps they'd go back to their little server closets where they won't do any more damage and they're actually good at what they do. Successful desktop linux is as much about removing people as it is adding them.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
Playing into a troll I know but the bloated slow tag is old.
With Gnome 2.0.2 nautilus on my machine is faster than Konqueror but in that file manager's defense it has some features that nautilus does not yet.
ACK
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
The NeXT style columns view (the default) is awful. I found I couldn't get it to display as much info as Explorer could in the same space, I found that copying between two locations meant I had to open 2 finder windows or engage the rather feeble tree widget. It wastes space, the big icon/preview is very pretty, but 90% of the time useless as I already know what the filetype is, it just takes up a big fat wad of space that could have been used for something else.
.png, .jpg, etc. are supposed to be noticed by the finder and passed to QuickTime for this same sort of detection, all behind the scenes. It happens in MacOS 9, I'm not sure why this feature is missing in OS X. As for other types, this was why file/creator tags where good: The Finder has a database of all files of type "APPL" which are the Mac equivelant of a .exe file. All APPLs which dealt with files where supposed to have a "BNDL" type resource (we love four-char codes on the Mac ;-) ) and in this was a listing of the (again, four-char code) program creator type and the various files it was designed to handle. So when encountered with a new file, the Finder simply checked it's link table to all the Apps and if there was no creator type, found the first applicable matching file type and set the new file's tags appropriately. Mac OS X needs a file extension registry as well as the type/creator registry (it's not like the Windows registry, mind you. File matching only.), but it seems to lack one.
Use the list view, and navagate with the arrow keys (or by typing the name of a file) and pressing Apple-O. It's like a graphical command-line that way.
It's slow. No really, even on 10.2, I could watch as it rerendered the Finder on a complex directory structure. Quartz Extreme me all you like, I didn't try it with that, as the drivers for the card in the machine I was using didn't support it (the owner had upgraded it himself). Rox is fast. The Finder is slow.
The Finder doesn't take up memory with caching all the directory structures, just the most recent. So the rendering is slow due to the Finder reading the icons + positions + the directory listing and all the other info from the disk. Buy a faster disk, or for a nice test, open a folder, watch it render slow, close it, and immediately open it back up. Ahh. Besides, by the time you find what you want, it's usually done drawing anyway. This is nitpicking.
Primitive typing: in Rox if I view the properties of a file, the "file" program will scan it and try to figure out what exactly it is. It'll say for instance "Screenshot.png: PNG image data, 1024 x 768, 8-bit/color RGB, non-interlaced" or "ASCII Text, long lines". The Finder just says "Document" for any type that isn't explicitly registered with it, at least rox tries to guess based on some reasonably smart heuristics
Ahh, now we're getting somewhere. This has been a problem since OS X, because type and creator codes are no longer required, and thus files dont' always have them. The most common types such as
Apparently no Rox/Nautilus type-ahead tab complete. This isn't a "hard" feature, once you know it's there anybody can use it, I've seen die hard Windowsers pick it up in less than 10 seconds. If the Finder has it, it didn't make it particularly obvious. Rox has a great implementation, just hit / and use it like you would the CLI, you can see it scan through the directories as you type, and get visual feedback as it matches. Nautilus2 has something similar though not as slick if you press Ctrl-L
A simple RTFM solves this. Use the technique I described above, type the name until the highlight matches, and Apple-O, or any other keyboard shortcut you'd like, depending of course, on what you want to do with the file. You can actually move quite fast once you get the hang of it, it comes as natural as typing and using the shift key.
No address bar? I feel sure it can mount FTP drives etc as it can do the iDisk, but there's no obvious place to type in any URLs for that.
Ahh, yes this feature coudl stand out a little more but the Finder is no Web Browser and therefore we keep this tucked away under the Go menu. Choose "Connect To Server..." or, for speed-shortcutting, use Apple-K (Konnect, C interferes with Copy). You can also add a button to the toolbar and click it if you so desire, go to View->Customize Toolbar... and drag and drop the buttons from the window to the toolbar to arrange.
You clearly like the Finder toupsie, but then you like anything that is Apple, and hate anything that isn't, this is a theme that comes across in most of your posts. File management is very much a personal thing - don't assume your view is the "right" view. Comments like "I can't explain, you must just use it" don't help your arguments by the way.
You clearly haven't used the Finder much, IamTheRealMike, but then you also seem to not care because it is Apple. This is a theme that came across in your post. Dont' assume you need to tell someone off because they defended their view - if I was to bad mouth the Linux kernel I'd be killed on this website, by all the slashdotters doing the same. Give it another try, look around carefully, Apple does things differently for a reason. You won't be a power user in a day. That's why Apple's interface is great, it does things logically but not the way other interfaces too. There is too much similarity with other file borwsers that limits them in some respects.
Of course, choice is yours, and I'm not suggesting you "switch", I'll leave Apple's ad dept up to that. It's like switchng from an automatic to a stick. Sure it's different, sometimes harder, but some people liek to drive stick alot more. (Ohh the trolls will have a field day with that!)
Toupsie: While I agree with you on the Finder, that was rather vague. Perhaps next time point out some of the things you feel make the Finder strong?
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
Samba browsing (SMB, "Network Neighborhood") is supported in the version of Nautilus supplied in Red Hat 8.0 ... in the address bar, simply type "smb://" to start. Have fun kiddies
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
O.k., call me crazy. But the thing I've missed the most with the move towards "desktop environments" like this is the loss of the ability to write to the root window.
"Why?" you ask? Call me silly. But I've loved that little xsnow program for ages. Every winter I put it on and it relaxes me so much.
It's a pity that it doesn't work (or works poorly) with all these new fangled things. I know that you can get it to work somewhat in KDE, but the icons get scratched off with each snowflake.
Can it be that hard to layer the drawing sequences in the root manager?
Sorry - small hang-up here.
But why stick yourself in the past? Nautilus 1 is a thing of the past, let it go. Nautilus 2 is the present, and it's a lot faster.
> Because RH7.3 is Gnome 1.4-based
That's what the source code is for. I compiled GNOME 2 completely from source.
This is why I don't use GNOME.
The best interface ever created is the Palm OS. There are familiar-looking icons on the "desktop", to choose applications, but that's it. Documents, accessed from inside programs, are in simple list form. No hierarchy, no navigation, just a list.
The reason Nautilus is still necessary is because ext2/3 is the standard Linux filesystem. Why not use something like XFS or Reiser, that supports live queries/database-type actions? With live queries, there's no need for user-created hierarchies; everything just sorts itself. And thus a single list, instead of the huge complicated interface Nautilus gives you, will suffice.
I want to see the GNOME guys use a window manager that bypasses window size controls for Ratpoison-style always maximized windows, but *tabbed* (dialogs should come up as Mac OSX-style panels, or better yet not at all - documents should be saving automatically, getting rid of the primary purpose for dialogs nowadays). I want to see the location of the mouse pointer made as irrelevant as possible, and thus context menus should be all but eliminated; cursor-based applications (text editing) can keep them, but everything else should use standard menus. I want to see lots of stuff... but GNOME wants to duplicate Windows; a noble goal perhaps, but not one that suits my needs, and that's why I don't use it.
(Maybe the X Window System isn't all that bad after all...)
Mac Finder, MS Explorer, Nautilus - all of them are too heavy for simple file operations: copy, move, delete, open. Besides, my arm is painfully sick from crazy mouse manipulations I have to do for simple file operations. And all such GUI doesn't bring any additional value comparing to ncurses-based mc.
Speaking about mouse, watch what Photoshop professionals use - keyboard shortcuts. When you need a speed - keyboard is your best friend and mouse is your enimy.
Less is more !
For a long time now, gnome has had the 'mini-commander' (now the 'command-line tool'). It sits on your panel, and if you type a command into it, it will execute that command. Extremely fast and easy--it almost completely replaces the menus for me.
Additionally, there is a "Run Program" option in Gnome2, and you can set up a simple script in Nautilus (see here) that allows you to type an arbitrary command into a dialog box and have it execute that on the files that were selected in Nautilus.
I think you've confused "easy to use" with "dumbed down". Contrary to popular belief, the two are not the same thing. Your washing machine example proves it. By your own admission, older less functional washing machines were difficult to use and had complex interfaces. Modern washing machines do more, but they're easier to use. Would you prefer a thirty year old washing machine because it had a more complex interface?
Another great example is VCRs. I used to have an old Panasonic with complex push-button controls for setting scheduled recordings. Heck, even setting the clock was a chore. Nowadays, a Tivo does everything that my old Panasonic did (and more!) but it does it with an easy-to-use OSD. Is the old VCR more powerful because it was harder to use? I think not.
This
As an experiment I gave one of my spare computers to my technically adventurous folks a year ago, loaded up with Linux, tweaked to be as user friendly for their needs as I could make it without making absurd security tradeoffs. They already have a windows computer as a safety net to fall back on, so I'm not on the hook for desperate technical support :)
When they do call, it's sometimes because they are trying to do something that doesn't have a GUI admin tool, but more often it is simply a logistics problem of how to get file A into application B.
They were heavy Mac users who switched over to Windows during Apple's pre-OS8 bad period, so they are fluent with the graphical filebrowser tools. The graphical filebrowser is their filesystem tool of choice, and there's no sense in retraining them to use a terminal window which, while better at certain tasks, is much less pleasing to the eye and completely unintuitive.
So Nautilus is my friend, and I was very pleased to find out that under Redhat 8.0 Nautilus is now fast enough to use comfortably.
In many ways Nautilus is innovative, and pushes the envelope just as much if not more than Apple or MS. Automatic thumbnailing of images, hover-playback of music files, integration with a variety of high level network protocols make it a surprisingly powerful tool.
Don't discount the utility of these kinds of tools, both for CLI experts and newbies. There's a lot to like both technically and visually.
Nautilus lets my folks use Galeon, Evolution, Grip, XMMS, OpenOffice.org, the CD drive, and their USB keychain drive as a coherent whole system instead of a random assortment of disconnected parts. It's the visual glue.
For the record, they like Redhat 8.0 better than Windows 2000 for internet browsing and email, but prefer windows for financial apps like Quicken and opening up other people's MS Office docs.
It would also allow a lot more variety in file managers because they would no longer have to manage the linkings.
While I'm at it, I would also like to see the ability to open tar files and ftp sites and smb shares moved out of the graphical file managers and moved to the open() system call, so that any program that wants to can read such names (use the KDE naming with smb: or whatever at the start). This would also go a long way to making it easier to implement file managers and would probably allow a vast number of new services to be added easily.
I discovered ROX about a week ago. ICEWM and ROX with the *excellent* GKRELLM for sys type stuff is excellent. Top if off with Mozilla, Pan and Sylpheed and 90% of your needs are probably met. XMMS of course, and MPlayer kicks tail.
Please grow up....
Perhaps you'll like Red Carpet
How about GARGNOME? It's a BSD ports-like system. It takes time to compile but if you have a reasonably fast machine, you should be able to turn your computer on in the morning, type in a command, go to work, and find a working GNOME 2 system when you come back from work.
(I've never tried it though.)