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Gnome Switches Nautilus Back To Browser Mode

Posted by timothy on from the open-in-new-window dept.

An anonymous reader writes "In one of the do-the-developers-actually-use-their-own-software decisions in the Linux Desktop World, back in 2004 Gnome switched to the 'Spatial' view by default with their Nautilus file manager opening a new window with each new folder viewed. Many derided the decision as poor design or as being different for the sake of being different. Well, after five long years the Gnome powers that be have decided to switch back to browser mode."

8 of 311 comments (clear)

  1. Nautilus following KDE's Dolphin? by GreatBunzinni · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It does appear that Nautilus' people are taking many many lessons from (let's not say ripping off) KDE's Dolphin. I mean, if you compare Nautilus' demo screenshot and you use KDE's Dolphin (please ignore the command line at the bottom and info dock widget at the right) on a daily basis you will be hard pressed to find any differences.

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    1. Re:Nautilus following KDE's Dolphin? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      (please ignore the command line at the bottom and info dock widget at the right)

      you will be hard pressed to find any differences.

      You're absolutely right! If you ignore the differences then you will be hard pressed to find any differences!

    2. Re:Nautilus following KDE's Dolphin? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Yes, they have copied the "split view" (one of the killer features of dolphin/konqueror).

      Now Gnome needs to fix the file chooser dialog so that it can 1) have views other than "list view", 2) view generate thumbnails of all kind of files that nautilus can (PDFs, videos, etc) 3) a list view that can order the files by something that is not modification date or size (for example, the type of archive) 4) a list view with BIG icons, not miniatures that are so tiny that you can't tell what picture is in the thumbnail and need a ugly extra panel on the right side of the dialog to show the preview

      The main reason why Gnome can't do all those things is why the file chooser dialog is not a "gnome file chooser dialog", but a "GTK file chooser dialog". The KDE guys don't use the QT file chooser dialog (which exists), they use a KDE file chooser dialog that can use any part of KDE (including parts of konqueror/dolphin) while the gtk dialog can't use nautilus or anything besides the basic GTK building blocks. They have been adding some hacks to avoid the need of writing a decent file chooser, but it still sucks and misses a lot of functionality.

    3. Re:Nautilus following KDE's Dolphin? by ciroknight · · Score: 5, Interesting

      view generate thumbnails of all kind of files that nautilus can (PDFs, videos, etc)

      With GIO, the file chooser can load any thumbnails that are available, but Gtk+ doesn't actually have the architectural pieces for doing thumbnailing itself (since it's quite a lot of specialized code that's not widely needed). But in most cases, Nautilus has already generated the thumbnails you require anyways.

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    4. Re:Nautilus following KDE's Dolphin? by ta+bu+shi+da+yu · · Score: 5, Informative

      Well, the rationale for changing from spatial to browser mode in Nautilus is because much of the functionality is now being implemented in Gnome-Shell.

      From the following post by Alexander Larsson:

      The current ideas behind the design of nautilus is that its the main way to access files. By this I mean everyday stuff like finding and opening your files, rather than "file management" (reorganizing files, copying files, etc). This together with the desktop having links to important places (as well as being a repository for currently worked on files) makes this a sort of "desktop shell" in the sense that its how apps are launched to a large degree. This is also why spatial mode is the default for the desktop icons (and why browser mode is availibile in the menus as "File Browser" for those times you want to
      do intense file management).

      However, in the gnome-shell design a lot of the things nautilus is currently used for (locating and opening files) is integrated into the
      shell and mixed together with the ui for locating and starting applications. This makes a lot of sense to me as launching applications and opening files with an application are closely related actions, and a merged UI could do a lot better than the current sort of double UI with the panel launching apps and the desktop launching files. The shell also wants to de-emphatize the desktop as a place for storing files in use and launching links, for good reasons (read the design paper[1] for details).

      This leads to two initial conclusions from my side. First of all we should disable the drawing of the desktop by default. Second we should default to browser mode. This might seem a bit suprising (sic) since I've generally been on the spatial side. But, this has mainly been because I've seen nautilus as much more used as a kind of file activation shell rather than a hardcore file manager, and when that changes the rationale for spatial mode change too.

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  2. Re:Is it really anything *new*? by Torrance · · Score: 5, Informative

    Debian uses spatial by default. I know, because it's about the first thing I change on a fresh install.

  3. Corporates in the Gnome Foundation by hebertrich · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Look 5 years ago indeed , in a gnome devel mailing list , we were a bunch to comment on that
    and a few others .. like the dual mode in other file browsers at the time where we have two panes to
    work with. Well .. lo and behold . a devel asked me why one would use a dual pane file manager.
    I gave up on it at that point. I suspect the corporates running the Gnome Foundation have a lot to do
    with most the bad design decisions and the stubbornness at making Gnome bad in general.
    As far as im concerned .. if it takes 5 years to change a bad default .. by 2020 we should perhaps have
    a delete command by default too :) Im cynical yes. But i loved gnome till 1.4 at 2.0 they hosed everything
    that was truly good about it and made it into the lesser desktop. A shame.

    Richard

  4. Re:Corporates in the Gnome Foundation by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    IMHO it's not 'corporates', it's developer group-think coupled with wilfully ignoring what damn near *everybody* is telling them.

    When this was rolled out, the forums were *filled* with people complaining, people explaining exactly why it was a poor design choice, etc. But this was simply ignored because someone had a nice academic theory about why "spacial was more intuitive". Never mind that it wasn't, and that everyone hated it, and that it wasn't how people were used to computers working. They had a theory! All the users must be wrong!