Default File Manager with Unity8 in future desktops | Hacker News Reader

Default File Manager with Unity8 in future desktops

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27 pointszeis49 comments

I'm pleased to see that they're working on a better file manager.

I have been using Linux for a long time, Gnome since v. 1.4. While I am enthusiastic about the platform as a whole, I feel let down by the Desktop teams as a whole.

While a few aspects of the UI are greatly improved (anti aliasing, localization, FX, etc.). In terms of functionality, applications have not gained much.

Nautilus especially has a history of removing features for the sake of "Design" that people depend on. remember the time when nautilus always opened new windows when navigating the file system tree? Or the gnome project announcing to remove the middle-click paste? Ubuntu moving the menu out of the windows into a mac-style menu bar on top of the screen, a behaviour you could not revert as a non-admin and menus were invisible (in favor of the window title) when not hovering over that top-of-screen area?

In general I do value thoughtfully designed user interfaces and I see that care has to be taken to avoid clutter and keep them clean and sanitized. But with the linux desktops, it just feels like the designers have lost their focus and just harp on _abstract_ principles.

As a linux enthusiast it saddens me that Gnome has not even come somewhere near to a functional GUI that could compete to MacOS or Windows 7 in terms of ease of use and functionality.

To me, the CLI ecosphere will always make me want to choose linux. Yet with the linux desktop I have more than ever the feeling that I have an inferior piece of software in front of me.

Canonical have an interesting challenge. The people who are most aware of their product are not their target market, and seem to actively dislike the direction their product is headed in. Worse, those people seem to be under the impression that they are the users that Canonical are targeting.

In my opinion, this phenomena might sufficiently explain why "desktop Linux" never went mainstream. No previous "desktop Linux" company was so willing to ignore the desires of existing Linux users in order to make a product that would be good for their target market. Canonical do seem to be bold enough to have a good chance at pulling it off despite their critics, though.

Meh. I think you are seeing more in the vocal minority than anything else. For myself, ubuntu has been fine and remains the distribution of choice.

I will confess I have considered toying with arch. I do build quite a few things from source, already. Still, I have found very little to fault ubuntu for. (And, really, I just want a high res laptop. Which I will quickly put ubuntu on.)

I actually hope you are right. While I am not exactly happy with Ubuntu's direction myself, I would be more then happy if they succeed at attracting more linux users.

I bet it's gonna be a file manager useable by power users with built in terminal, full copypastable path shown by default, ability to navigate inside of zip files as if they're directories, tree view, directory bookmarks, etc...

Ah wait, no, that are the features of file managers of 10 years ago, after that they only got dumbed down to target regular joe. Yay progress.

Ubuntu have made it really clear that they want to be a competitor to Windows and be very different from typical Linux operating systems. If you're using Ubuntu and expected it to be like Debian, you made the wrong choice of operating system. In my opinion, Ubuntu and Debian are both great, but they are targeting massively different types of users.

A competitor to Windows?

I'd say even Windows 98 has a better UI than what Ubuntu has become: at least Windows 98 has a taskbar that can show multiple instances of the same program.

(And fortunately, so does KDE still, for now, for long I hope)

Whether they're succeeding or failing isn't really the point. The point is that if you're in the IT industry, the Ubuntu UI isn't even trying to cater for you. It is Canonical's expectation that you will prefer some other operating system rather than Ubuntu.

Do you have any examples of file managers like this from back then?

KDE Konqueror

For the record, Dolphin has all of those features as well (although text-path-by-default and open-zipfile-as-folder both need to be enabled manually).

Is Ubuntu replacing everything above the Kernel one piece at a time?

In the case of nautilus, they're right. Gnome developers are slowly becoming delusional and losing track of what they're supposed to accomplish. Therefore, its time to put Gnome aside and build something new.

I totally agree. Starting from Gnome Shell to removing type-ahead find from Nautilus, GNOME developers' decisions have been more and more deluding.

Nautilus, like any other software of the GNOME project is subject to the "unexpected" changes by the GNOME team... as when they decided to remove the type-ahead-find feature. As long as the Ubuntu team create better software and replace "bad pieces" I'm with them.

I spent a good chunk of time restoring type-ahead find to Nautilus, which is now available in trusty-proposed (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nautilus/+bug/1164...).

Now I read this. Not very happy.

At least Ubuntu 14.04 will have type-ahead find. Thank you for all your work.

I suppose that's true. Thanks!

I used to love Nautilus. It's gotten steadily worse year by year.

Would that necessarily be a bad thing?

It's bad if for no other reason than they're spreading their resources thin. They've already got a huge number of projects to maintain -- a window manager, an entire graphics stack, an init system, a cloud storage stack, all used almost exlusively in Ubuntu, and all in addition to the more traditional distro duties of maintaining a set of kernel patches and an up-to-date and secure software repository. I'd rather they concentrate on the latter.

Yes. See my earlier comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7083763

Are we really going to fault Canonical for developing new open source projects, or for those projects not being adopted outside of Ubuntu? I don't have a need for another file manager any more than I needed another init system, but if this was being done by anybody besides Canonical, the comments would say ~"So stoked to see a new option disrupting the file manager space".

They're betting they can provide a better UX with their own tool. If they fail, or can't maintain it, or whatever, then that's on them, and people will shift onto other distros.

I'm looking forward to seeing what they do better, in the hopes that other projects can benefit as well.

If Canonical wants to develop a new file manager, power to them! I, too, am looking forward to seeing what they do better.

My comment was specifically in regards to the idea of 'what's wrong with Canonical reinventing everything', e.g., discarding Wayland for Mir. Sorry if that was unclear.

In theory: No, but it might make sense to make the difference between Ubuntu and all other Linux distributions clear. Maybe Ubuntu should not be called "Linux" anymore, just like android which also uses the kernel but has it's own userland.

In practice: Yes, Cannonicals questionable open source policy could throw free software desktops a few years back. Just look at Mir for an example. EDIT: or hdevalences comment below!

There appears to be a giant difference between ubuntu and android, though. Seems somewhat vindictive to feel ubuntu is no longer linux.

If you take Unity as an example. It's a wonderful idea that is full of bloat, bugs and small usability problems but nobody really seems to care about it.

it might just be. the idea of open source encourage them to contribute and make current projects better - if nautilus isn't suit for them for some reason they should try to cooperate with this project developers to add features and changes, and IMHO only if they get some really tough "no" on their most needed features they should start their own replacement. preferably as a fork. just as google does with webkit - they contribute and make the current open source project better and only when the project management (AKA Apple) blocked them too hard they had to fork it.

You're thinking of Mint.

I don't like the NIH syndrome, but I like using what's probably the most popular distro and especially the software variety in the community PPAs.

So what's the best way to get a more vanilla Linux desktop experience without losing the convenience of the Ubuntu PPA ecosystem? Use a Ubuntu remix? Can you use PPAs with Debian? Or do you not even need them with the cutting-edge Debian variant (whatever it's called again)?

edit: NIH, not NIMBY, thanks kudu for the correction.

Arch Linux might be what you're looking for, if you're willing to take the plunge. You get a bare bones machine when you install it, and you make your own desktop experience. You can install GNOME or KDE, or something more lightweight like openbox, or a tiling wm like i3 or xmonad.

What you want, though, is something like PPAs. You're looking for the Arch User Repository [1]. You can install some helper like Yaourt [2] and run something like `yaourt -S leagueoflegends` to get user-contributed packages.

The other thing that really does it for me with Arch is the excellent wiki, which documents nearly everything you'd ever want to do with Arch Linux.

[1] http://aur.archlinux.org/

[2] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Yaourt

Arch, in my experience, tends to not work well if you don't care for it. It rots; the longer you don't keep up to date on everything, the worse the experience of using it gets.

I would rather install a new version every year or two, have the regular updates run when I use the computer, and have everything I need as quickly as possible without too much effort. Ubuntu with PPAs provides this experience. Arch provides the latter, but fails at the former.

You're absolutely right. Arch does not like being neglected. That being said, I had no trouble falling into the habit of running pacman -Syu and glancing at the archlinux.org home page every day or two.

Also, it might be possible to set up a cronjob or a systemd service that sees if there are any posts on archlinux.org that you should read, and if not, does an automatic update regularly.

If you like a DE use the remix they are pretty vanilla (ubuntu gnome, lubuntu, kubuntu, xubuntu) you can make them more vanilla if you forgo installing a desktop cd and just install the DE without the *-desktop package from a minimal or alternative cd install.

Otherwise give up on ppas (they may or may not work on debian) and look at maybe open build service or something.

Mint i think is compatabile with ppas but mint is very not vanilla

I switched to Arch Linux after the Amazon fiasco and can only say I wish I did sooner. It's marvelous, and if you think Ubuntu's PPAs are good, you need to see the AUR. I think I've done the `./configure && make && sudo make install` thing literally once on this system, and it wasn't because the tool wasn't in the AUR, but because I needed special compile flags with vim.

Just to add to this, even for the special-compile-flags case, you shouldn't need to go the manual-make road; you can easily customize packages with the ABS (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ABS) and use them like AUR package (I used a customized gtk3 for a while using this method, and it worked wonderfully).

I use Ubuntu without any desktop, using the dwm window manager. My "file manager" is the bash shell. None of their interface experiments affect me, but I get the advantages of the drivers and PPAs. I haven't yet seen anything in any desktop environment that interests me; and running this way leads to low memory overhead and a very snappy response on older hardware.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIMBY

I don't understand how it applies in this context?

I think the OP meant NIH (Not Invented Here), rather than NIMBY.

Unity is already moving from Gtk to Qt, so the move away from user-visible GNOME elements is natural. The question is what they're going to do with the GNOME "plumbing". To fork and maintain a mixed Gtk/Qt legacy codebase, or to reimplement everything from scratch...neither seems attractive.

I liked the days when Ubuntu was a nice, simple distro that I could recommend to beginners. Nowadays, every desktop distro is becoming more and more of an "island". The main "alternative" to Ubuntu, Linux Mint, is also replacing pretty much every piece of the OS with its own (NIH).

I would actually like for there to be a nice, simple distro that anybody could use, with only general, vanilla Linux software.

I'm sure that there's going to be plenty of dissent on this, but Arch is a pretty simple distro and attempts to keep packages as vanilla as possible. Their wiki is also an awesome resource (I find myself using it even when troubleshooting things on non-Arch systems, to great effect).

It's definitely not a one-click deployment, and they've made some design decisions I'm not a fan of, but as far as simple systems go, they're on a great track.

> I would actually like for there to be a nice, simple distro that anybody could use, with only general, vanilla Linux software.

Your are looking, depending on your use case, either for Debian or Fedora.

If you want a very reliable/stable desktop OS and are not set on using Linux you might want to consider FreeBSD or PCBSD instead. The perpetual alpha/beta quality of most popular Linux distros plus increasingly fragmentation between makes BSD a better choice for me these days.

Try Xubuntu. The interface is about boring and rock solid as it gets - it hasn't changed in years. And you still get Ubuntu's excellent hardware support.

Try debian.

Try elementary OS.

Elementary is amazing but isn't it one of the most NIH-inflicted distros? Custom DE, app manager, dock, I think every app it ships with is theirs, etc. I guess it's a bit more vanilla than the Ubuntu it builds on, but it's all very NIH.

Yes, but I recommended elementary OS because the person I was replying to wanted "a simple, nice OS anybody could use". I've used a lot of Linux distros over the years (I have a "Linux computer" and I often install different distros just for fun) and when someone asks me the same question my answer is usually "either install Xubuntu or elementary OS". I could be considered a power user, but even I'm using elementary OS right now because it's so hassle free and it just works. Xubuntu is the same, but it's a bit boring compare to elementary OS.

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