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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.'
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.
Well, I've never met the opportunity to use Finder... as well as MacOS in general.
As a developper, I find the enthusiasm of your reply quite interesting. Can you provide examples/urls about the features of Finder you find superior to Nautilus' ? I mean, features not also found on win platforms ?
No flame intended, I'm just interested in the UI concepts of as many platforms as I can handle.
Cheers
Karma cannot be described by words alone.
"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.
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
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.
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
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.
You're enthusiasm for Apples products is great, but I feel I give an alternative viewpoint. I've used the Finder, Explorer, Nautilus, Konqueror, Rox, and the command line, so I have quite a bit to compare it to.
I feel the Finder sucks bigtime:
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.