The GNOME developers removed it.
askubuntu.com
askubuntu.com
Good thing is you have alternatives from MATE to KDE, Xfce, E17, etc. etc. It's not like you're forced to use Nautilus either.
Personally i never understood the hatred towards change. In the beginning of Gnome 3 it was really extreme and now it's slowly getting better (with the complaints) because people become accustomed to it. It's GOOD that Gnome tries to make it simple, because we all wish for a Linux computer our parents could use. That's just not going to happen with the options-and-complex-information everywhere approach.
After all Gnome Shell isn't that bad and i'm sure a guy posting on HN who uses Linux on his Desktop has the skills to check his available diskspace without the status bar ;)
The key difference is it's effectively a file search that is easy to back out of, so it only shows files that match your input. Personally, I find that makes it a lot easier to flip between a bunch of files with similar names, and it's making me really like search — which I had never really used before. It'll search recursively, but the files from the current folder are listed first, so it's harder to get lost among them than it sounds. (And I think there might be something on the roadmap to list files from the current folder and from elsewhere under a separate heading, but I could be mixing that up with something else).
I would love to see data on this, but my impression is not that it is growing its market share.
But from reading the mailing lists, the impression I have is that this isn't really the developers' main concern. They aren't removing features to create a more streamlined UX, but because they were horribly implemented, and without this control damage, they would have to reboot the codebase again with a Gnome 4.
i assume if something changes for the worst you enjoy it? your phone can no longer auto dial. do you celebrate? your word processor no longer has spell check. do you pat the developers on the back?
its a bit of fud and tone deaf to say people have hatred for change because gnome3 sucks. this is the same fud that the gnome PR machine keeps trying to spin. no one is that stupid. it's a slap in the face of gnome2 users. it comes off as snobbish and condescending. like a crappy pop band that never makes it and blames the audience because there just not ready for the profound brilliance of there music. honestly the gnome project and its hobby lobby need to get over themselves and learn how to take criticism and learn from there mistakes if they ever want to put the project back on track.
people use gnome2 because it's a quality desktop with the efficiency needed for professional workstation users. that was the goal of the gnome project. they radically changed direction to chase the tablet market and fell flat on there face. if gnome on tables was a success i doubt that we would hear one word from them about the desktop anymore. the desktop was thrown out with the bath water. now that they have failed, the only users they have left are an angry group of desktop users who just want some improvements to gonme2. will the gnome project ever care enough to shift back to the desktop in a serious way and make a quality desktop for these users? i think the answer is no. as long as RedHat keeps paying the bills they will keep dancing. gnome3 has zero chance of taking the place of gnome2 and most organizations have shifted to a new desktop or are in the process of doing so. the gnome project is essentially dead, with no vision for the desktop market they still have and no penetration into the tablet market.
Basically every change imposed by the GNOME team has left many, many users much worse off than they were before. Furthermore, it's very doubtful that these changes have actually made any other users better off.
Taking away useful functionality doesn't make a system "simpler" to use. It just makes it impractical at best, but more often than not it makes it outright useless. That's what GNOME has become to a lot of us, and that's why we no longer bother with it.
We want to use software that makes us more efficient, rather than software that's "simple", yet forces us to put in much more effort to do basic and essential tasks.
This is not a new development. They have been moving in this direction since more than a decade ago. Whoever didn't get it when 2.4 came out, probably likes the way Gnome is changing; or just wasn't a Gnome user back then.
It's never too late...
But yes, if your distribution ships it, then it's a good choice.
If you're willing to leave the false abstraction of stackable "windows" behind in the quest for maximum productivity, I suggest you give it a shot.
I'm sitting out 13.04 Unity because of the LibreOffice menu highlighting and shortcut bugs.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libreoffice/+bug/7...
[edit: However, I still use Nautilus, and thanks to the article this thread discusses I'll likely now have to switch that out... oh well. I was switching from barebones Ubuntu to Debian anyway thanks to Canonical's growing nuttery.]
Why is the GNOME project still dominant, when they consistently make arbitrary changes and refuse to listen to their users?
Why: It is hard to break a dominant position when they enjoy 2 order of magnitude more corporate support than their closest rivals.
The comparison to what has happened with GNOME seems particularly off-base, since Microsoft was not actively seeking to destroy existing workflows and pitch anyone -- power user or not -- overboard. On the contrary, their fanatical devotion to backward compatibility largely remained and paid great dividends, as it has for ~30 years.
I say this not as someone who has any need to defend Microsoft, by the way. My livelihood has never substantially depended on anything Microsoft-related, and my own first choice of productivity OS was Linux by the late 90s, and OS X by 2006.
Your apparent worldview simply cannot be reconciled with my own experiences. It's as if you'd said what a lovely shade of puce the clear blue sky was.
I like the majority of the changes they've made in recent years. I think Gnome Shell is the best desktop around. It's not perfect, and the GNOME people do make the occasional UI blunder, but I'm not sure what else you're expecting. It's basically impossible to have a widely used project like this move forward because every change brings loud angry people who were totally using that.
I think the reason why GNOME is still dominant is because they're willing to ignore their users and make hard choices, not in spite of it.
if gnome were a new project to make linux pretty, everybody would be talking about how awesome it is. it's only a problem because they're taking the old gnome that people were used to and changing it. and people are afraid of change.
Sure, sometimes it's just this, but often times such removal actually break person's workflow or ability to (easily) do something. Just because it may be better for majority does not mean it can't actually suck for some.
I am sorry to pick your post. It just happened to be the one where I finally felt the need to respond to this view.
and none of the critics ever say "this broke my workflow, but i can see how it's a niche feature", the complaint is always "the gnome devs removed this obscure feature that only me and three other people use, because they're fucking idiots and are trying to make the software useless". if you're complaining about a change that is better for the majority, it means you're being selfish. and nobody ever seems to acknowledge that. all the armchair critics of UI changes always insist that they are complaining on behalf of everybody.
Are you kidding? Dolphin is probably the best graphical file manager in existence. It's streets ahead of anything on Linux, OS X or Windows.
The only thing I miss on OS X is actually Dolphin.
2. Press the "control" button on the toolbar for a menu when hidden.
3. You're right about KIO urls.
Dolphin is also very fast. Even if you have enabled thumbnails for files and open a folder containing thousands of images it shows all files instantly and loads up the thumbnails in the background. I can't remember Nautilus ever doing it like that, though in fairness I stopped using Gnome when 2.2 took away the "launch terminal" option from the desktop's context menu.
I doubt that. If you are running Ubuntu, try running "sudo apt-get install dolphin && dolphin"
Or use Trinity's KDE3.5 and live the full Konqueror experience.
Also, as someone who does not use a full DE, I appreciate the fact that the defualt is not to start managed the desktop when you start PCManFM, as opposed to Nautilus which defaults to managing the desktop when you open it. I still don't get why managing the desktop is always the same program as the file explorer, but Windows does the same thing, so their might be some deeper reason than 'becuase nautilus is doing it'
http://witchofbontemps.wordpress.com/2013/05/05/an-artist-ha...
My intuition is that they went from almost total dominance a few years ago to total irrelevance now (< 2%).
If you mean GNOME Shell, I still find <2% hard to believe, as its still the default on Debian and Fedora.
I've been using standard Ubuntu as my sole OS for over 6 years now. I'm most likely switching to Linux Mint or Xubuntu when I get a chance.
And in fairness, they did add something else http://i.stack.imgur.com/NiggU.png (last comment in the parent link).
But I don't remember apple removing many features from the finder or changing the menu bar since OSX was launched, so I think your simile is misaimed.
No vague assertions, please be more specific
"yet their fan base not only approves of it, but they somehow justify"
Coincidentally their "fan base" is composed of several people with design and user experience knowledge (in various degrees) so I believe their acceptance of things has a basis. (And it doesn't mean they accept everything)
Edit: as an example quoted by the other commenter, inversion of scrolling direction was a big change. But it is configurable, so you can always go back
The natural scrolling makes sense if you're using a trackpad, but for a scroll wheel it's awful
Yes, the 3-finger swipe can be only done if you have an Apple trackpad, either the built-in one or you the separate one (I have one of these and it's nice, having come from a trackball)
Not sure if you can do this with the magic mouse (maybe there's a different way)
I don't think this is true. They get crucified because they're trying to create a desktop experience for a market that doesn't exist.
Their GNOME 2 user base were all workstation users who were using GNOME 2 in their day to day lives get get work done. Instead of making GNOME 2 better (under the hood) the GNOME developers decided to jump onto the tablet UI bandwagon and drastically change the UI. However, their user base simply didn't need this, they just wanted a more stable desktop top rather than a different one.
In my opinion, the crucial mistake the GNOME developers made was forcing this new UI experience through peoples throats by chucking out everything they accomplished with GNOME 2. GNOME 3 should have been a separate project under a different name. If it really was that much better than GNOME 2 then at least people had a choice to switch. But now we can't and everyone is scrambling to find a GNOME 2 replacement..