Little rant about GNOME's file manager (a.k.a. Nautilus) | Hacker News Reader

Little rant about GNOME's file manager (a.k.a. Nautilus)

randthoughts.github.io

175 pointsuncoaxable5208 comments

Original Nautilus developer here. This really distressing, but not surprising, given the various issues GNOME has had over the years. I wish I could come up with a solution, other than raising a large amount of cash and creating another entity like Eazel who would have the same amount of focus and concern for the user experience the original team did.

1999-2001 Nautilus didn't have type ahead search as far as I can recall, but the search, thumbnail and icon layout issues were all things I worked on. I am pretty sure thumbnail generation was quick, icon layout was stable and search was decent. If not, Andy and Darin would have been on top of us to fix is ASAP.

Was the nautilus business plan

1) create file manager

2) ?

3) profit!

You are getting down-voted, but I understand your comment as the history of Eazel will become less known as time passes. The company was only around for a couple of years.

There actually was a business plan and it involved configuration services and remote storage of files and settings. I thought it was a pretty good concept and the success of various companies over the years providing these services validate our business plan.

As to why Eazel failed, well there were many factors. The dot com crash, Microsoft pressuring OEMS like Dell and Gateway to not ship Linux pre-installed and the return of Steve Jobs to Apple were just some of them.

It was no surprise when easel fizzled out. At the time i was really wondering where the income was going to be. But thanks for the nice file manager. Hopefully you got to work with hertzfeld. That alone would have been worth the price of admission.

Nautilus was just one component of Eazel's general push for a business-ready Linux desktop.

Helix Gnome?

Thank you for creating Nautilis, I've been using it since 2006.

Just out of curiosity, what DE do you use these days?

You may be disappointed by my answer, but I have been a Mac user since 2001. Steve Jobs hired as many of the Eazel team members who wanted to come to Apple when the company closed. Many of us took the offer and other went to Android, Google, Red Hat and elsewhere. At Apple, I worked on Finder, Spotlight, Time Machine and other projects. Feel free to flame me about those. I'll accept some responsibility for the issues those projects have.

Wow that's an impressive portfolio! I don't know why exactly, but I really like time machine. I'm not sure if it's a usually disliked piece of software, but at least for me it makes back ups so much easier. Especially for my girlfriend who is not very technical.

Thank you for your work!

I won't flame you over it, but I will say that if it wasn't for your later work, I wouldn't be using Linux on the desktop :p

All's well that ends well, I suppose!

Hah. Totally. I am no longer at Apple and free to improve other software. Just curious, what were some specific issues that caused your move?

There's a plethora of reasons, especially today. I used to do the whole "Windows for gaming, Mac for productivity" thing, but as time went on I started to really hate macOS. The first pet peeve of mine was Spotlight and it's file indexing, which would always melt my computer whenever I cloned repos or did anything outside of a blacklisted folder. Eventually I just disabled the file search altogether. Finder was also never my favorite file manager, but a lot of the reasons really just boiled down to HFS and APFS being really annoying to use, and Apple's own idea of how files/folders should behave. I never quite understood it, and Finder never felt like it helped me make sense of all the "magic".

Unrelated to your work (of course, nothing personal though), I really started to hate the time I spent developing on Mac. Deploying to Linux machines while running a decades-old FreeBSD amalgam kernel was an unbelievable pain in the ass, and I wound up spending more of my time fixing Mac stuff than actually developing software. The lack of a package manager burned me up too, since both Macports and Homebrew had their own issues that simply wasted too much of my time. About 3 years ago I pulled the trigger and switched my main machine to Linux, and I've never looked back since. Seeing that Apple is ditching x86 now, it looks like I made the right call (at least as a developer). Simply put, I spent too much time trying to make MacOS behave like Linux, and I was tired of constantly losing control/options.

The worst thing for me is slow docker performance. Not usually an issue on my work MacBook since I tend to do stuff on remote build servers, but it can be really annoying to spin up projects on MacOS without polluting your OS with all the dependencies.

There’s not really much way around this since Linux puts syscall traps in every binary rather than routing through a libsyscall.so that contains the traps. (If the latter were the case, a container could provide an alternate library to do syscall interception much more easily on non-Linux platforms.)

I recently had to switch to Mac for the first time for work and knowing you worked on both Nautilus and Finder I'm shocked that my favorite features from Nautilus are nowhere to be found in Finder:

Right click in Folder > Open Terminal

Right click in Folder > New File

Thanks anyway though for your work :)

Thank you for being part of creating a usable Linux desktop back in the day. Even though I long since migrated to Unity and KDE desktops I really appreciate the work.

How does one get involved in writing these kind of apps? I once looked into gnome2/mate development but only found a few books that were 10+ years old, and that was several years ago. Would prefer Python over C, but maybe that is not possible for core apps.

If there is an open source project out there that you want to be involved in, you just start contributing. Either find an open issue you want to fix, or identify some feature or improvement that you would like to see and implement it. This sounds simplistic, but this is really how you can get your start. Starting a new project and getting mind share and traction is a lot of work, so it is often a better use of your time to get involved in an existing project that aligns with your interests. Good luck!

> you just start contributing

Before doing anything I think it's wise to look at how other contributors were treated. Sometimes maintainers just aren't very open to contribution. Gotta pick one's battles, otherwise it can lead to a lot of wasted effort. Spending time exploring a complex codebase and formulating a patch set only to end up being ignored can be a very negative experience.

Hmm, wasn't getting at that aspect, not yet anyway.

Rather, I'm looking for information on what languages/libraries are required, setting up a build environment, getting familiar with the GUI libraries, etc. Where are the config files? Glibs? I think that's a thing. Dbus? Styling has completely changed a few times, for example. Basically an up-to-date tutorial. I used to do GUI programming about twenty+ years ago, so wouldn't be a complete newbie.

Once done with that, I'll think about focusing on the maintenance or greenfield work I'd like to do.

What about the simple selection of several files with the mouse? And then dragging that selection over another Nautilus window?

Instead of moving the files, the dragging action removes the selection, making it unusable for the most basic folder task.

Nautilus is so broken I prefer to use the console for most file related tasks.

What you just describes definitely works in modern versions of Nautilus. Just checked on fedora 34.

I have a nagging memory that this may not have worked in the past though.

I actually find Nautilus perfectly fine to use. My biggest gripe is sometimes it's difficult to right click to get a context menu that isn't a file selection (ie: to create a new folder when you're in the list view)

> Nautilus is so broken I prefer to use the console for most file related tasks.

I feel this way about every file manager. If there was a CLI file save dialog I'd never see Finder or Explorer or Nautilus.

Rox Filer is what Nautilus should've been.

Blazing fast, good console/terminal integration, RoxLib.

I do not know about the other issues, but I imagine most pictures taken nowadays, compared to the early 2000s, are in a much higher resolution than what is possible to process in a very fast way (without HW acceleration). The only way is to watch pictures being added to the disk and process them ASAP, which is a bit more involved than many users like (and adds hidden costs to the simple "copy" operation).

Aren't thumbnails already embedded in the picture metadata usually? I don't know if they actually need to process every single picture to generate it, so the size should not be that bit of a factor. I'm not sure how nautilus deals with pictures though

There may be done image formats with thumbnails in metadata, but in general, no. You have to generate them. Which makes sense too since you'll need multiple sizes of them, depending on your use case.

It seems like Linux Mint is exactly that entity now. They do a wonderful job with largely gnome derived apps.

Probably an unpopular opinion here, but these aren't technical issues. They're cultural. Bounties won't fix it. In the case of the file picker issue, there have literally been third party patches that the GNOME devs could have used.

I couldn't stand more than a couple days of following their gitlab discussions. Each issue goes through roughly the same process: someone suggests a feature or a fix for a thing, the GNOME devs either say "#WONTFIX you're holding it wrong" or get mired into an endless debate of the minutia of the _best_ way to implement the feature.

If you want to fix GNOME, you'll have to replace the entire leadership structure _and_ a good portion of the devs (and somehow get them to ignore the zero-utility clingers whose contributions consist of endless discussion posts but no code). As it is they act like they were hand-picked by Microsoft to make sure progress happens slowly (if at all).

>Probably an unpopular opinion here, but these aren't technical issues.

I don't know, GUI freezing during file search sounds quite technical and very non-cultural to me.

The root cause of the issue is cultural. If you find an issue like that and bring it up to the KDE devs, it gets fixed. If you bring it up to the GNOME devs, you'll get stonewalled.

> If you want to fix GNOME, you'll have to replace the entire leadership structure _and_ a good portion of the devs

Isn't Cinnamon pretty close to doing this anyway? And arguably other alternative desktops like Pantheon or Budgie.

After temporarily coming back to GNOME from spending a lot of time with KDE, I've found Nautilus to be pretty much worse than even Windows Explorer. Besides the issues mentioned, some other issues I run into:

- Can't manually type in a path

- Moving into a mounted drive clears navigation history, so can't back out to the previous directory

I also somewhat miss how Dolphin would re-open where I left it, tabs and all. That said, I'm on v3.36.3 so maybe it has fixed those issues in the 2 years since.

I think that you need to press Ctrl+L to type a path.

Which incidentally is the same hot key used to go to the url bar on browsers

Mnemonic: L for Location

I've always used ALT-D.

I'm a long-time Linux user and I know the short cut and use it often. Nonetheless I have no notion why the Nautilus developers consider this to be a better UI than just rendering an editable path!

Honestly, I'd be fine with it if "edit path" was an option in the dropdown menu for navigation pills. I guess the Nautilus designers drank too much of the Apple kool-aid and decided that advanced features like custom paths should be avoided at all cost.

i actually prefer the pills by default, but what I don't like is that it's not clear you can switch.

You do, which is dumb, it should be doable by mouse or really really easy to find. It shouldn't require Googling or hunting. Ctrl+L is listed on page 2 of the keyboard shortcuts for Nautilus when it's arguably such a basic thing that at very least it should be in the stupid hamburger menu. Keyboard shortcuts should be a shortcut not the only way to do something.

It's the same shortcut as in all browsers, same for Ctrl+T or Ctrl+W that operates on tabs (Yes Nemo has tabs). The same way a browser is also a file crawler and viewer. It's the same paradigm. So no definitely not dumb.

And in KeepassXC it's lock database, which is infuriating when it's your muscle memory for "focus that primary thing you type into" and your unlock password is long.

What browser requires you to hit Ctrl+L to enter an URL? I'm not saying the choice of Ctrl+L is dumb, but the choice that the only way to enter a path is Ctrl+L.

Huh, I hadn't considered that they might have a shortcut for it, TIL!

That will definitely easy that pain point a lot, although it's still a somewhat odd decision to not have the path in the bar editable too.

You don't even need that, you can just start typing the path and the path bar will show up on top.

Probably because Windows Explorer is great file manager.

By the way, in Nautilus you can type path, the shortcut is ctrl+l

Nautilus is pretty bad but I find macOS Finder even worse.

I can AppleScript to Finder on the toolbar and do some pretty nice stuff. For example, the script to add a button to open a terminal in the directory the window is showing is trivial.

Would you be willing to share such a script?

I found this example code from 2008 for an up button on the apple website:

`tell application "Finder" set the target of Finder window 1 to (container of target of Finder window 1) end tell`

But I am getting an error on modern OSX... I would be interested to see how your button works :)

Well, Affric you seem to have done something, so here is the code:

  tell application "Finder"
    set myWin to window 1
    set thePath to (POSIX path of (target of myWin as alias))
    set thePath to (quoted form of POSIX path of (target of myWin as alias))
    tell application "Terminal"
      activate
      tell window 1
        do script "cd " & thePath
      end tell
    end tell
  end tell

You use it to create an application and then change the icon to something appropriate.

I’m curious what you dislike about the macOS Finder.

I like it to the point that if I need to organize a bunch of files, I’ll sometimes just export the folder as a file share so I can organize the files from a Mac over the network.

>Probably because Windows Explorer is great file manager.

Having it pointed out like that, you're right. I think my 'big' complaints about Windows Explorer have just been the lack of tabs, which I think are being/have been added in Win11) and the multiple-windows-single-process model, which hasn't been as much of an issue lately with explorer being a lot more stable.

Otherwise explorer is a very smooth experience. I just treated it as bad because of frustrations with Windows in general.

explorer also allows you to create a new window in a new process now, but not using a keyboard shortcut as far as i can tell. you have to go file > new window > new window using a new process. finicky, but possible.

There's a setting in the Folder Options that lets you force folders to open in their own process.

Find the "Launch folder windows in a separate process" option under Folder Options -> View

Or at least there is in Windows 10, idk if they removed it with all the other useful stuff removed in Win11.

It's still got some weird behaviours. For example right-click gives you the context menu for the currently selected file, not the one you just clicked. And no confirmation for large operations - you accidentally dragged one folder onto another because of a dodgy touchpad driver? You're now moving those GBs and will have to revert it manually afterwards.

> lack of tabs, which I think are being/have been added in Win11

Unfortunately, they backtracked on that, so still no tabs.

I use QTTabBar and Link Shell Extension. Only thing I sometimes miss is the option to dropdown-view folder contents

Agreed, I'm not even a windows person, but it's file manager is pretty awesome compared to Gnome and Mac OS IMO.

Finder is shite. I've had to use Mac OS for the past month and I hate it.

Windows explorer is quite good. It could still improve a lot, as you can notice after using Dolphin, but it's good. I don't think it qualifies for "great", but well, that's subjective.

>By the way, in Nautilus you can type path, the shortcut is ctrl+l

Obligatory what the fuck were they thinking. I'm glad there is no api to access the "flash bios" button on the motherboard because some nautilus dev would surely find a feature like this to bind to that button.

> - Can't manually type in a path

As a Windows user, recently I found myself within a new Ubuntu install. I wanted to view `/opt/` in file manager, but I couldn't find howto enter a path. A function that is really easy and intuitive in Windows Explorer. The first answer on Google was `CTRL+L`, which worked. But the stark difference of the ease of use between these two applications still baffles me.

Fun fact: Windows Explorer also has the same hotkey for typing out the path.

As do all browsers. It seems to be a standard.

...still doesn't work for Finder though.

I mean, it’s just command-shift-G, which you can discover from the “Go” menu.

Where is the "command" key on my Linux box?

The key is called "super" on Linux and "Windows" on Windows. On a Macintosh, it is called "command".

According to USB standards, it is called "GUI".

You can also just type / or ~ to start typing a path from the root or your home directory.

That said, I am with you, I like Windows Explorer best of all.

The only problem I ever had with KDE is it randomly hogging the CPU. On different machines, same problem. And not just for a minute, but 10+. Still not sure what the reason was, that was Fedora 24 to 30 and some random Kubuntu between (yep, all had that problem randomly). Maybe it's fixed these days.

GNOME just got worse and worse lol

When my machines were doing that on Plasma it was typically the Baloo file indexing or some Akonadi related process that was going crazy on the CPU. This week I switched back to Gnome Shell after a few years of Plasma on my main desktop and I must say it feels a lot more responsive than Plasma.

You are absolutely correct of file indexing and it was true of the prior iteration Nepomuk. It is seemingly a complex thing to get right. File indexing sucks hard in several instances

- When the OS is running on the same spinning rust or performance is substantially impacted by said rusts performance - When the filesystem uses encryption but isn't hardware accelerated - On first run when it has to index everything - If the filesystem performs poorly on lots of small files.

So you boot up on a fresh install do you just not showcase features working to their fullest or do you sink performance for the first hour or hours on some systems much more than others? I think personally you ought to prompt the user to schedule the first run of the file indexing service since it will impact performance far more initially than it will thereafter.

>The only problem I ever had with KDE is it randomly hogging the CPU.

Can you be more specific, like what process exactly did that?

Not OP, but plasmashell, activitymanagerd, recently krunner. The first two because I have a sshfs mount, the latter only recently for no good reason.

>Not OP, but plasmashell, activitymanagerd, recently krunner. The first two because I have a sshfs mount, the latter only recently for no good reason.

I don't doubt you, I never had performance issue with my KDE though I always run LTS Kubuntu. I am wondering why plasma or activity monitor would have issues with your filesystem.

My guess is that they query a service that does file operations for no good reason, and then busy wait for it.

Had the same issue when trying to switch over my dad to a Linux distro. Absolutely had to find an alternative to Nautilus that was intuitive to a Windows Explorer user. Closest I could find was PCManFM.

Nemo is nice. I haven't checked ssh mount but it handles mounting Google drive with no issue. It's part of Cinnamon, which is the user-positive Gnome2 fork (versus Gnome3's user hostile approach)

You are much better off using Overgrive. Last time I used the integrated Google Drive / Dropbox sync in any distro, the performance was abysmal.

MATE is the Gnome2 fork, Cinnamon forks Gnome3.

TIL. Thanks for the clarification.

It is quite superior to Gnome3. I'm glad the developers built it.

I'm on Ubuntu 20.04 with GNOME and I installed Nemo because of type ahead search. It works well.

Not very discoverable, but just like on the browser, hit ctrl+l.

I got told by a GNOME dev on reddit that I use my file browser wrong when I complained about lack of type-ahead search. I've switched to KDE since.

I got told the same thing here once when I complained about the lack of type-ahead-search, by someone who apparently thinks that sort of thing is too confusing to people who aren't technical.

Blog post mentions Cinnamon's nemo as not having the same issues as Nautilus and I have to agree. I've been distro-hopping for years (just to keep myself current) and Nemo is by far the best and most stable file manager for GNU/Linux. macOS' Finder is the only FM that's nicer but Nemo has few things that makes it even better than Finder. All in all, I'm super-happy with nemo! Kudos to Cinnamon team. And don't forget to donate to them! [1]

[1] https://www.linuxmint.com/donors.php

I wholeheartedly agree that Nemo provides a far better experience than Nautilus.

But Nemo is also not without issues. Crashes when deleting files in certain situations (folder tree is expanded and you delete all files). If you are using Nemo and use a lot of network drives or external drives, be prepared for random freezes.

When that freeze happens, killing Nemo doesn't help, nemo -q doesn't help, restarting cinnamon doesn't help. That's when I fire up the ol' trusted Thunar.

Please file any bugs you come across on their Github page! From my experience, they fix crashes quickly. I came across a similar issue a while back and they fixed it in the next release.

https://github.com/linuxmint/nemo/issues

The worst bug with nemo is when handling remote filesystems, it switches to a some kind of fallback mode that disables keyboard shortcuts and context menu options but drag/drop still works and you have to kill it to continue working.

Nemo still doesn't have folder thumbnails, which is an odd omission that I feel like shouldn't be that hard to implement. It's one of the few things I miss from my windows days when navigating through my albums

>folder thumbnails

Is that a Windows feature? I've only ever used macOS and GNU/Linux so never got used to that. I just did a quick search on their Github Issues page and didn't see it requested. You can file a request here: https://github.com/linuxmint/nemo/issues

https://github.com/flozz/cover-thumbnailer works well for creating thumbnails.

Ah, wait until you experience the Nautilus file picker. Want to attach an image? Here's a list of all your photos in this folder, but the preview is 100x50, have fun.

"No thumbnails in the file picker" is a longstanding meme, as I understand it. Somewhere there's a >decade-old bug report (feature request?) about it.

I don't mind it personally as I happen to be aware enough to be able to locate most files without thumbnail previews. But it would lessen the cognitive load of using GNOME if they had proper thumbnail views.

Maybe when they switch everything to GTK4. One can hope.

It's not just an old bug/feature request, there are three working patches that were posted there over the years, all of which have just been ignored.

There is a little write-up here: https://lobste.rs/s/ky5yop/gnome_has_no_thumbnails_file_pick...

The file picker isn't Nautilus; it's GTK. It's all library code, usually running in the same application.

One nice effect of applications moving to FileChooserNative (which they need to do if they want to be sandboxed nicely) is that for newer applications we can have that file chooser in a separate application (with broader permissions).

But even so, right now it's just the GTK file chooser in a separate application. In the future, Nautilus will be able to provide the file chooser, but that future hasn't arrived quite yet. Someone needs to build a file chooser mode for Nautilus, and someone needs to add a little more plumbing to xdg-desktop-portal so it knows how to deal with an application like Nautilus providing a default file chooser. But it will be much better, in part because the preview code will all be in one place :)

Maybe then you can use the KDE File picker on all your apps and not be forced to use the shitty GTK2/GTK3 one. I also dislike the GTK file picker limited sorting options(maybe was improved recently, I prefer sorting to be case insensitive)

This will supposedly be worked on in GNOME 43, fixing the file picker should now be possible, as they've completed the separation of GTK and GNOME UI code. The new GNOME file picker portal will be able to leverage full fat Nautilus to render itself.

And yes, Nautilus has some long awaited UI improvements planned for that release.

Never agreed more and these aren't isolated things.

I used to use my desktop as a scratch disk. Desktop icons used to be handled by an instance of Nautilus in much the same way as Explorer does in Windows.

Then one day, one developer disabled it. This followed a low-feedback discussion, a quick sermon that using the desktop was wrong, and that was that. Months later when this impacted popular cadence distributions, it was clear it was a problem but the limo promise that Gnome Shell extensions would be good enough, well... They've fallen far shorter than what I need.

My productivity has fallen because one dev who wanted the mantle of maintainer, took decisions for a million users without real consultation.

Why don't you simply retain productivity by dropping gnome? After all this isn't exactly the first time they have dropped a feature people were peeved about.

No it's not. Not the first feature I've been angry to lose. I've been doing this a while.

I do try to shop around every few years, but return to Gnome. KDE is perpetually never quite right. Visual clutter, forcing desktop metaphors like Activities on me, and poor integration (read: different toolkit) with the things I actually use.

I agree, I should leave. But doing that is even more change. At some point I just need to get some work done. I'll moan and groan and maybe one day Gnome governance will stop individuals vandalising the project's applications without community buy-in.

> Visual clutter With a mote of customization this is not an issue. Choose a minimalist plasma and icon theme and replace menu bars with the configurable hamburger menu, or place them on a panel Mac OS-style.

>forcing Activities As corroboration for rejecting this I'll admit I've been using KDE Plasma for a long time and I still haven't bothered to figure out what they do. Not only are they not forced, their discoverability is 0.

>poor integration with GTK apps The context menu hover looks different, but apart from that non-CSD apps arguably look more at home than in Gnome 3

I don't know why I felt the need to defend a desktop, but I get the impression that Plasma is judged by its defaults rather than its possibilities.

You say you shop around but only mentioned KDE, while XFCE, MATE and Cinnamon would be more suitable first alternatives for a previous GNOME user.

Unfortunately they're still susceptible to GTK maintainers bad decisions but despite that they're still a breath of fresh air compared to GNOME.

The biggest pet peeve I have is creating a new file/folder in an already populated folder. You can't right click anywhere without opening a context menu for a file. Getting a context menu for the folder itself to show can be an impossible fight at times.

I can't remember what version this changed in, but in the header bar you can right click any of the folder breadcrumbs to open a context menu. Once you have 42, there's actually a menu button for the current folder, and you can click anywhere in the breadcrumbs area to activate it. It's the best way to do things in the current folder ;)

> I understand GNOME lacks resources, but oh boy, when I see developers’ time and effort spent on endlessly redesigning and rewriting core apps, I wonder: is that really necessary?

Relative to the rest of the desktop development scene? That's bullshit. GNOME has more resources, paid volunteers and users than anyone else in the scene. That's why it's so embarrassing that they can't get extensibility right, and they can't even make defaults that their users will agree on. They're shooting themselves in the foot and complaining when nobody wants to treat their gaping wound.

As far as I can tell, the GNOME philosophy is that the proper level for the operating system to manage fundamental operating system tasks like hardware detection, filesystems and network interfaces is at the desktop level. So that's where they put their resources.

In this light, they fall far short of the resources they need for proper QA and user testing.

I used to use the elementary file manager and it was great... Then they started adding features that were really bad. Like they would try to calculate the size of a directory and its contents when you would just hover over the directory. For a directory with a lot of files that can be a CPU intensive task. My file manager was literally pegging one of the cores on my poor already overworked pinebook pro. For a feature I didn't ask for and which had no way to be disabled from the ui. Not wanting to poke around dconf, I tried a handful of file managers and settled on nemo. It just works, has a decent number of toggles, is leightweight. The familiar name was a bonus ;)

The one thing I miss from elementary's file manager is the column view.

A lot of elementary stuff was fantastic, if they had the nerve to fork their stuff from GNOME then I think there would have been a lot of people (myself included) who jumped on their bandwagon. Unfortunately it looks like EOS is on it's last legs right now, so I guess we can only watch and see what the future holds. Dolphin is fine too, I guess...

KDE is just so much better. Dolphin is a pleasure to use.

I feel like you can change dolphin “into” any file manager you want. It’s so configurable and really is a pleasure to use.

It's true, you can use another file manager as your default in KDE, via the settings application. Don't take my word on this but it's something you can do as early as since the KDE4.x days, when Dolphin was starting out and people were used to Konqueror.

I understood flatiron to mean you can configure Dolphin to look and/or behave similarly to other file managers, not that you can literally swap it, even though you might be able to.

KDE 3.5 had all the knobs you could imagine and probably had more than KDE today

Is there an easy way to store my KDE environment in a dotfile? KDE seems like it _can be_ the perfect DE given enough customization. How do I maintain and reuse that customization (aside from something like Nix)?

It's been while since I used it but I think all KDE applications store configuration in $HOME. I don't remember any global registry nonsense like in GNOME and Windows.

KDE stores a lot of dotfiles. I have had luck preserving my config because I don't wipe my root folder, but aside from that it's quite hard to migrate from one PC to another.

i use dolphin with gnome, gnome is a nice ux in general but lacks a lot, as was highlighted.. mixing elements is the only way to get a useful experience unfortunately

Konqeror was the best.

The few times I got annoyed by Gnome its 'my way or the highway' approach and switched to KDE, I whiplashed back to Gnome within a day due to how buggy and perplexing a lot of the decisions in KDE are.

That's fair. I also left KDE because I wanted a simpler system with less dependencies. I couldn't tolerate GNOME and all the alternatives so I just dropped the entire concept of an integrated desktop environment.

I installed i3 and it changed the way I use computers forever but I still miss many of the KDE applications. I wish there was a way to use them without bringing in the rest of KDE with them.

>it changed the way I use computers forever

Can you tell us more? I don't know a lot about i3, but that sounds interesting!

Tiled workspaces turned out to be a perfect match for me. I can easily organize windows into any layout I want: tabbed full screen windows, editor and terminal. The keyboard driven interface is so nice it's actually frustrating whenever I have to use anything else. It's very simple and effective.

KDE breaks every time you touch it. Not sure why all of these picky commenters leave that out every time we discuss DEs.

Because it is not true. Or at least, that hasn't been my experience in the last 13 years I've been using it.

Have you ever changed the theme?

I always change the theme, I've never really had it break. Most of the time I'll leave it on "Breeze" though and just change the colorscheme, but I seldom see it break in a way that's not immediately fixable (eg. switching icons to dark mode). Even when I did play with custom KDE themes, I never noticed it break much more than GNOME did with custom themes.

Yes

Just did.

KDE is more stable than ever before. I'm on 5.24.4 on Arch, fwiw.

I left that out because KDE never once broke when I used it.

KDE either works flawlessly and one praises it endlessly, or you change one setting and everything crashes at the slightest touch. I'm unfortunately in the latter camp having tried it twice over the years.

My biggest issue was this: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=426644 I've settled on Manjaro GNOME right now because while it's not as customisable as say Cinnamon (which I started having issues with after the latest release - mainly workspace switching gradually grinding to a halt) it seems more stable than KDE.

Don't have the energy to rice XFCE. There really isn't a DE that "just works".

> Don't have the energy to rice XFCE. There really isn't a DE that "just works".

That's not DEs, that's your distro which requires ricing.

If you install, say for example, Xubuntu, XFCE works as much as other linux DEs do.

Of course it may not be just working as much as Windows or macOS does, but that's same with all linux desktop environments.

> Not sure why all of these picky commenters leave that out every time we discuss DEs.

Because it's a lie.

They don't discuss it because its not their experience in the first place.

Plasma has the second biggest share behind gnome without being the default on many distros. Did you really think a quarter of Linux users sat in a constantly crashing environment saying well this is fine while their computers are on fire?

https://linux-hardware.org/?view=os_de&colors=30

KDE doesn't have IBM/Red Hat's resources behind it. Bugs are fixed and rolled out in new versions of libraries including KDE libraries and supporting libraries from outside KDE. If fixes aren't backported and if you use a version with 19 known issues that aren't ever going to be fixed and aren't worth reporting because they in fact have already been fixed in libraries you wont have access to for the next 2 years then your experience will not match someone who is actually running recent software.

I remember demoing netrunner years back when it shipped an edition that was based on Ubuntu with KDE. Everything crashed constantly. If this was my first experience with KDE I might have incorrectly come to the conclusion that KDE was unstable. In fact Netrunner made a shit show of shipping a combined package that just didn't work effectively.

The typeahead flame war is an interesting case where "user stories" clash with users -- both sides are ultimately talking past one another. The user story is "users can type the name of the file/folder they want and hit enter to navigate to it" which the current implementation satisfies. But the people in the thread want one specific implementation which, while a totally valid ask, has the exact same user story as full search. This way of looking at design makes "how the software feels" really hard to quantify and justify as a deficiency. Although, for me, I think after getting used to Crtl-P, FZF, VSCode, Telescope in Neovim and "Ctrl-K" in lots of apps I'm with GNOME devs on this one and that faster full search should be the end goal but that's just like my opinion man.

But I want to use the current folder as a namespace limiter :(

> But I want to use the current folder as a namespace limiter :(

And it is! The files in the current folder _always_ sort to the top. The only real loss between this and the previous behaviour is that the view changes slightly, so the other (not matching) files disappear. But even the selection sticks, so if you hit Escape you can see the matching file in context.

Sure, and so why not put that recursive search behind ctrl-p? I'd certainly use it.

But as someone who has grown up with computers, it's quite aggravating to not be able to "pu<enter>src<enter>mod<enter>vi<enter>in"

Sure, it's more intuitive to do that in the terminal, but sometimes being able to quickly drill down and THEN be able to inspect the folder visually, is very helpful.

... to access public/src/modules/views/index.js

I think my main issue is that GNOME's search is dog slow. If Nautilus had the speed of FZF I don't think you would miss it but I'm open to being wrong. You would just type pusrmovi<enter> to jump to the folder or just viind<enter> to go to the file.

Ah, interesting... yes, the search is indeed dog-slow. If it's a filename match, it comes up fairly quickly because it's been indexed, but if I pass in a path, or parts of one, then it doesn't come up with anything at all.

The dev's response to the "flame war" was the primary reason I switched full time to Nemo and never went back.

The user experiences are very different between the two features and trying to conflate them is a mistake in my opinion. since I use typehead to navigate the file manager quickly without touching the mouse, replacing it with a very slow recursive search made nautilus unusable to me. Even if the search was very fast, though, it would still be a good search but a bad navigation tool.

Luckily there are alternatives and Nemo is a great file manager.

> Lack of type-ahead search1. Believe it or not, triggering a full-blown recursive search doesn’t replace the ability to focus a particular file in the current folder by simply typing (part of) its name. I suspect 90% of users—especially those coming from Windows or macOS—expect the latter behavior

MacOS is actually the source of this annoying behavior

You can focus any file by typing its name in MacOS.

However, the behaviour is somewhat weird. If your current selection is a folder, and you start typing, it's a 50/50 guess of where it will start the search: in the folder you've selected, or in the parent folder of your currently selected folder

Edit:

Reading other comments I now realise you meant the behaviour of Cmd+F which doesn't default to "search in current folder".

Thankfully, there's a setting for that now, added a few years back: Cmd + <comma> in a Finder window -> Advanced -> "When performing a search: Search the Current Folder"

On the "search" thing - one accidental feature of browsers that I appreciate is the clear demarcation between "find (on this page)" and "search".

On any application, if "ctrl-F" does not provide me immediately with a terrifylingly fast search-dialog that will scrape through literally the thing that is in my current window and nothing else, you fail. Period. Ctrl-F is part basic workflow expected from modern systems.

Search outside of what's in the current window? FAIL.

Search slowly? FAIL.

Nautilus' behavior would be analogous to spawning a Google search when I hit ctrl-F in Firefox.

This is the reason I hate Discourse forums with passion.

I used Nautilus for a little while and ran into all of these same issues. Since I use i3 and not Gnome, I decided to replace it with another file manager rather than deal with the headache. I’m using xfe. It had the power user oriented features I want, but don’t love it either. The icons are rendered very badly on a HDPI screen. I guess I’m still searching for the right file manager.

Tried Dolphin?

I've been trying it out since your comment, and I have to say it's not bad. I don't love the look of KDE-ecosystem apps, but I'm warming up to them more and more.

The thumbnail problem goes back to a beginning mistake of aggregating and hash indexing all thumbnails into one directory. They should have just followed the solution from the xv viewer and supported .xvpics. The reason they've never fixed such basic ux things is just gnome developers being gnome developers.

>is being almost neglected

Not sure whether it's negligence or result of GNOME's vision.

Dolphin (KDE file manager) is simply peak of GUI file managers for me. I can't even think of one functionality it lacks that I would use

... and it's integrated with the best terminal emulator in the observable universe; what's not to love?

Sometimes if I have to use Linux, one of the most frustrating parts of the gnome file manager is how on some distros the path text input at the top is simply not there in some distros. It used to be there all the time. I don't know why this essential feature was removed/hidden behind impossible to find settings.

Not only impossible to find, the gtk3/4 devs actually changed the underlying gtk versions to stop respecting gsettings to enable pathbar even if the user did find and set it. But they didn't remove the gsettings. They're just non-functional.

And because it's gtk3/4 not only the desktop environment applications are effected. All gtk3/4 using applications are. Things went downhill quickly after ~2014.

>Sometimes if I have to use Linux, one of the most frustrating parts of the gnome file manager is how on some distros the path text input at the top is simply not there in some distros. It used to be there all the time. I don't know why this essential feature was removed/hidden behind impossible to find settings.

I only speculate. some distros like Ubuntu were undoing some GNOME feature removal shit because they were listening for user feedback, so the difference could be that some distros are shipping GNOME vanilla(as their big ego designer intended) and some are trying to undo some damage with patches , extensions and different defaults.

Does gnomes designer have a big ego? Could explain the poor usability

yes, only giant ego will explain defending of stupid ideas with stupid or fake arguments and never admitting your assumptions were wrong. My suspicion is this designers do not really use the products they design.

Nautilus I fell in love with in Ubuntu 6.06 was miles better than the current one found in Ubuntu ~20.04.

There used to be a way to have Gnome use Nemo as the default file manager vs Nautilus, but that was years ago. I have no idea if it works with the most current versions of Gnome at this point.

It works and I do that everytime I setup fedora.

A quick google search shows: xdg-mime default nemo.desktop inode/directory application/x-gnome-saved-search

You then have to add nemo to your applications, via alacarte.

Full answer is at: https://askubuntu.com/questions/981440/change-default-gnome-...

To add to that, it annoys me that it's still not possible (I know an extension exists) to change the default terminal on the right click menu "Open in Terminal"

I kinda went through this recently. I had been experimenting with both tilix and alacrity. I'm going by memory now on the phone, so bear with me. I ended up deleting the apt extension thas is actually the functionality behind the default "open in terminal". You kan provably find it with a "dpkg -l nautilus | grep terminal".

Then I installed some nautilus python package (I don't remember the exact name), which seems to be integrated. I also installed through there some project that was supposed to add any terminal. At the end it showed multiple entries for alacrity and tilix. So I uninstalled the package. And suddenly then I had just the entries for the terminals I used.

That said... It's not great that nautilus doesn't respect x-terminal-emulator. That is exactly what it is for.

That's the Gnome ethos of being against customizability.

Gnome specifically developed an API for this use case: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/nautilus/-/tree/master/libnau...

You can place your own custom actions in ~/.local/share/nautilus/scripts if you don't like the API, any file with execute permissions will appear in a "scripts" submenu in the nautilus context menu.

There have been several helper programs that interface with the API for you to allow you to add custom options without writing any code, but nobody seems to maintain them for long. I guess the feature simply isn't popular enough.

The reason for that is that the menu item you're seeing isn't a feature of the file manager, it's a feature of the terminal emulator itself hooking into the file manager. You can see how it works here: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/console/-/tree/main/nautilus If you uninstall GNOME Console, you'll see the menu item disappear.

Any terminal emulator developer can hook into the Nautilus API if they wish to do so. This approach is no different from the Windows approach, actually.

As very few developers care enough to integrate with Nautilus, I've written a shell script that launches my terminal of choice, moved /usr/bin/gnome-terminal to /usr/bin/gnome-terminal.old and placed the script in the original place with execute permissions. It's far from perfect, but it's easier than learning the Nautilus API and submitting a pull request.

the answer isn't: it's fine because it's linux and you can use something else. The answer is: ok, it's broken, but it's GNU: you can fix it yourself!

Or you can just acknowledge that all software comes with warts, problems, and limitations.

And be thankful that you can use whatever manager you want. And don't have to use Apple's file manager.

except that isn't the answer gnome is notorious for being a pain to work with if it doesn't align with their vision.

Case study: https://youtu.be/ON0A1dsQOV0

Gnome makes it really hard to fix these kinds of things yourself without forking the entirety of Gnome.

At this point, Nautilus really is just a file manager! It isn't the file chooser; it doesn't mount external devices; it isn't the desktop background.

If something is hindering one's ability to create an alternative file manager, there is probably a completely uncontroversial patch that can be sent upstream.

This “you can fix it yourself” argument is really tiring sometimes.

For a project like nautilus, there are very few people with the resources and motivation to fix anything. So we end up with underdeveloped open source products.

Maybe we should try “we need better funding and coordination” for open source projects.

I think most open source projects need better funding and coordination. The fact of the matter is that if you want something, you can ask nicely, pay for it or make it yourself. Asking nicely usually ends with "no", which is a perfectly valid response, and the other options are often too expensive (nobody wants to pay full dev time for adding and maintaining feature in Nautilus) or too much work.

I used to think that surely the GNOME people had enough resources to develop feature X until I saw how few GNOME developers there really are for a project this size. Until more people join in and start developing in their free time, "basic" features people all want so badly simply won't appear any time soon.

Not only that, but the people who do have the resources and motivation quickly hit the brick wall that is contributing to Gnome. Engaging with the Gnome team from the outside is exhausting.

Gnome developers actively discourage fixing things yourself even though they often use that as a reply to bug reports. Fixes are often rejected as "not bugs" so most just give up and move on.

Yeah, you can fix everything yourself. Up until you get tired of fixing and just use a normal OS that isn't breaking something random every update.

To be honest, if you "freeze" an installation (i.e. never update anything), it works pretty well!

The difference between server and desktop packages seems to be professionalism - the latter just aren't developed/maintained to the same standards as the former. I love Linux and what you can do with theming, though, it's quite amazing.

I hope you like maintaining a fork forever, because that's the most likely outcome.

Is there any reason file managers can’t be switched out? It seems like something that would be easy enough to configure, especially in Linux.

They can, but they usually control the desktop, so if you want a consistent experience it is somewhat ill-advised.

Joke is on you, GNOME doesn't have a desktop :d

You can, though? If you're on Gnome, simply install Dolphin or Thunar and your file manager should change. You can revert it in Settings > Applications > Files by resetting the application handler for the application you just installed.

People seem to be confusing the file manager (nautilus) with the file picker (whatever an application chooses, often the GTK file picker) and the desktop (which can be, but isn't always, part of the file manager).

I just want a good column based gnome file browser like MacOS' finder.

Although sometimes it feels like I'm one of very few who use column view.

Regarding 3, I have found search in Nautilus to be faster than Windows Explorer, which never returns.

I just wish I could get Miller columns in Nautilus

Honestly I've never really had search performance issues in Nautilus. Windows on the other hand...

I haven't bothered with Windows' built in search (explorer, and god forbid the Start menu search) for finding files since discovering Everything

https://www.voidtools.com

I keep it pinned as the first item in my bottom row of programs so I can hit Win+1 to fire off an instantaneous file search whenever I want. It's great!

Windows search is godawful. Not only is it slow, but it explicitly omits a bunch of directories, like AppData in your home. Guess were most applications keep their user accessible data. It's so bad.

If for example someone wants to install a GIMP plugin, you can't tell them to just search for the GIMP directory from their home, because the search simply won't find it.

Search was great in 7. Taskbar search - perfect. Then they did something to fuck it all up. In Windows 10, I get different results for the same search in Taskbar (that's how I launch everything, so if I type "Note" and open N++ a few times, that's it, it should remember it, which is how 7 worked).

Explorer search isn't even working half the time for me lol, either it doesn't show any results or the search bar is completely inaccessible. Fuck knows what's wrong with it, I just use Agent Ransack.

That "something" was integrating a Bing search into the process, just in case you were trying to find "how is babby made?" on your filesystem search.

The behaviour of search, to search the entire system by default rather the the current directory, is really stupid.

I like it that it includes subdirectories and doesn't just filter the current directory but I agree that including everything feels both counterintuitive and counterproductive.

If you wanted to search the entire system, that would be available from Activities (or whatever the view is called) anyway.

My old moan would be multi file copy to something like usb. In the end I discovered, if I create a folder on the desktop, copied items, and then copied the folder. The process was far less painful. Or just drop to the CLI and rsync. But cherry picking files to copy is a drag.

Common use case though.

I've used GNOME for so long that anything other than Nautilus feels clunky to me. Though to be fair I almost never search for anything, so those pain points don't bother me. I just want a file manager that gets out of my way.

Right about the time Nautilus was Eazle, something like that, some other effort had Navigator as your desktop/browser/file manager.

But I can't recall much else. Anyone?

That's nothing compared to the "argument list too long" problem in plain vanilla Linux.

Like when you glob (*) too many files in the terminal?

Yes. I have 64GB of memory, yet I get these errors for filename lists that should take less than 0.1% of it.

At least GNOME file manager does not give up.

This part seems unnecessarily entitled:

> "...when I see developers’ time and effort spent on endlessly redesigning and rewriting core apps, I wonder: is that really necessary? How about working on these major issues instead? One of them dates back to 2006. I guess that fixing a 16 years old bug is not as exciting as rewriting the default image viewer in Rust6."

I've helped with bugs that are old enough to drink and they're typically not fun -- I do it because I get paid.

I can't tell whether the author's suggestion for the GNOME Foundation to fund a bug bounty is an offer to contribute to said bounty but even if the author is submitting patches or contributing money it would be worth keeping in mind that this work is typically done by volunteers who have the freedom to choose how to allocate their limited free time and energy.

If the author has nothing to offer but complaints and still expects contributors to stop doing exciting things that interest them in order to fix old bugs then they come off as a choosing beggar.

(It reminds me of when I used to volunteer with trail maintenance -- work would have gone a lot faster if all the people who complained about trail conditions actually showed up to help.)

>I can only imagine how miserable photographers’ experience must be

Photographers don't use Linux.

Photographers don't tend to use regular file managers, either. I mean, previews are good and all and there are definitely problems here, but the photographers I know use tools like Adobe Bridge for a multitude of reasons.

The photographers I’ve known generally use some kind of dedicated application to organize their photos. Lightroom is one of the common ones. Adobe Bridge is another. Shotwell works on Linux.

I think the real problem is that I don’t know any half-decent photo editing programs on Linux. GIMP seems to be the best option, but it’s not even on par with mid-1990s Photoshop.

Darktable and RawTherapee are excellent, but they just can't keep up with Lightroom.

GIMP needs a name change and a serious injection of money like Blender.

To be honest I don't understand why 'the industry' doesn't want to invest in this. They hated being tethered to things like Maya, I can't imagine they enjoy being tethered to Photoshop.

It's 90% a project coordination problem, I think. Blender's efforts started early with a foundation being created shortly after it made it first open source release. It took from 2002 to 2006 for the first movie project from the foundation, and those projects were necessary as a spearheading effort to clean up the core featureset. It took roughly another decade of those projects and gradual efforts to revise the UX before the public perception switch flipped from "Blender sucks" to "Blender's awesome." At that point it snowballed and the project is now swimming in resources. But there was always a clear point of contact in the middle steps that helped make the best use of the resources that were there.

GIMP doesn't have a foundation to talk to, other than GNOME, which actually makes it harder to engage with because it means you have an institution in the way that fights ICs. GNOME is infamously bad at outreach efforts for its top level applications. What seems to define GNOME, at least in the past decade, is that the thing actually being developed is the libraries, while the existing apps are just being shepherded down the road to keep up. And as long as that's the case, the apps will be undermaintained because the foundation will gravitate towards a "don't touch that" policy for everything that isn't a library feature. GIMP has changed very little as a result.

Like, just look at the state of GIMP's developer information. It's a dumpsite. Nobody is in a marketing role or cleaning up documentation. There is development activity, but the bulk of communication about it comes from third party sources who aren't touching the code.

Maya is $225/month. Photoshop is $21/month. I think that explains at least part of it.

I did not know it is that stark a difference. Thanks for the tidbit!

See "Cinepaint: The long forgotten GIMP fork that once powered the cinema industry"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28578323

I use Digikam (Organizing) + Darktable (RAW Image Processing) on GNOME 42 (NixOS Unstable)

I'm not even a photographer, I'd just like to be able to find a photo organising app on Linux that can do facial recognition as well as Picasa could 12+ years ago. It's sad.

No, it's not that, it's that they don't use the file manager. Linux has DigiKam and DarkTable as native options. Once you have lots of photos you don't really use the file manager as they can't filter on other metadata like GPS, focal length, stars/ratings, etc.

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