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

https://randthoughts.github.io/little-rant-about-gnomes-file-manager-aka-nautilus/

by uncoaxable5 • 4 years ago

175 208 4 years ago

randthoughts.github.io

vondur• 4 years ago

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.

bpfrh• 4 years ago

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-...

awhow• 4 years ago

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

digitallyfree• 4 years ago

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

hbn• 4 years ago

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!

jandrese2• 4 years ago

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.

jotm3• 4 years ago

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.

Egoist• 4 years ago

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"

okamiueru• 4 years ago

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.

HKH2• 4 years ago

That's the Gnome ethos of being against customizability.

jeroenhd5• 4 years ago

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.

jeroenhd5• 4 years ago

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.

smm11• 4 years ago

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?

dotnet003• 4 years ago

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.

vbezhenar• 4 years ago

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

dijit• 4 years ago

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

dcminter• 4 years ago

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!

goosedragons2• 4 years ago

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.

dotnet003• 4 years ago

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.

seiferteric• 4 years ago

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

Jnr• 4 years ago

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.

protomyth2• 4 years ago

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.

klodolph5• 4 years ago

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.

dotnet003• 4 years ago

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.

robotburrito• 4 years ago

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

raffraffraff2• 4 years ago

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

marcosdumay• 4 years ago

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.

no_time• 4 years ago

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.

alex3305• 4 years ago

- 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.

mynameismon• 4 years ago

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

Stratoscope• 4 years ago

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.

jotm3• 4 years ago

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

zorr• 4 years ago

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.

simion3145• 4 years ago

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?

phoronixrly• 4 years ago

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.

tomrod3• 4 years ago

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)

pmontra• 4 years ago

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

marcodiego• 4 years ago

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

lloydatkinson2• 4 years ago

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.

superkuh• 4 years ago

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.

simion3145• 4 years ago

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.

lloydatkinson2• 4 years ago

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

matheusmoreira7• 4 years ago

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

flatiron3• 4 years ago

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

Gualdrapo2• 4 years ago

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.

candiddevmike2• 4 years ago

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)?

matheusmoreira7• 4 years ago

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.

approxim8ion3• 4 years ago

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.

throwaway67743• 4 years ago

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

guessbest• 4 years ago

Konqeror was the best.

jorvi4• 4 years ago

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.

matheusmoreira7• 4 years ago

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.

jklinger4102• 4 years ago

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

Gualdrapo2• 4 years ago

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

matheusmoreira7• 4 years ago

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

TheCapeGreek• 4 years ago

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".

approxim8ion3• 4 years ago

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

Because it's a lie.

michaelmrose3• 4 years ago

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.

efficax• 4 years ago

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!

lazyier• 4 years ago

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.

jatone• 4 years ago

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

matheusmoreira7• 4 years ago

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

traverseda• 4 years ago

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

dylan-m5• 4 years ago

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.

thebeastie• 4 years ago

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.

jeroenhd5• 4 years ago

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.

yoyohello13• 4 years ago

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.

tebruno99• 4 years ago

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.

jotm3• 4 years ago

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.

criddell• 4 years ago

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

diskzero5• 4 years ago

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.

flatiron3• 4 years ago

Was the nautilus business plan

1) create file manager

2) ?

3) profit!

diskzero5• 4 years ago

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.

AceJohnny2• 4 years ago

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

candiddevmike2• 4 years ago

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

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

diskzero5• 4 years ago

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.

alyandon• 4 years ago

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.

digisign2• 4 years ago

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.

diskzero5• 4 years ago

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!

Shorel• 4 years ago

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.

mnahkies• 4 years ago

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)

joombaga• 4 years ago

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.

Jiejeing• 4 years ago

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).

mardifoufs3• 4 years ago

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

eternityforest• 4 years ago

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

eloisius2• 4 years ago

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.

selfhifive• 4 years ago

Tried Dolphin?

eloisius2• 4 years ago

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.

brightball• 4 years ago

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.

melissalobos• 4 years ago

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

kasabali5• 4 years ago

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

jeroenhd5• 4 years ago

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).

Spivak2• 4 years ago

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.

truffdog2• 4 years ago

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

dylan-m5• 4 years ago

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.

julianlam3• 4 years ago

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

Spivak2• 4 years ago

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.

bj0• 4 years ago

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.

naoqj• 4 years ago

I can only imagine how miserable photographers’ experience must be

Photographers don't use Linux.

dylan-m5• 4 years ago

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.

klodolph5• 4 years ago

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.

post-it2• 4 years ago

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

jorvi4• 4 years ago

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.

fabianhjr• 4 years ago

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

raffraffraff2• 4 years ago

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.

seized• 4 years ago

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.

monkeybutton• 4 years ago

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.

dylan-m5• 4 years ago

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 ;)

smoldesu5• 4 years ago

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.

loudmax• 4 years ago

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.

CameronNemo• 4 years ago

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.

smoldesu5• 4 years ago

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...

amelius2• 4 years ago

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

post-it2• 4 years ago

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

amelius2• 4 years ago

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.

julianlam3• 4 years ago

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.

branon• 4 years ago

"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.

Beltalowda• 4 years ago

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...

dylan-m5• 4 years ago

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 :)

simion3145• 4 years ago

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)

sph• 4 years ago

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.

truffdog2• 4 years ago

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

dmitriid• 4 years ago

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"

bloopernova• 4 years ago

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.

Pxtl• 4 years ago

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.

kasabali5• 4 years ago

This is the reason I hate Discourse forums with passion.

Andrew_nenakhov• 4 years ago

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

Jerry23• 4 years ago

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

sirius87• 4 years ago

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.

Jerry23• 4 years ago

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

zekica• 4 years ago

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.

AdmiralAsshat• 4 years ago

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

Jerry23• 4 years ago

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

callamdelaney• 4 years ago

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

Delk• 4 years ago

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.

asoneth• 4 years ago

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.)

forgotpwd16• 4 years ago

is being almost neglected

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

mackal• 4 years ago

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.

rstat12• 4 years ago

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.

throw7• 4 years ago

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.

oliwarner2• 4 years ago

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.

michaelmrose3• 4 years ago

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.

oliwarner2• 4 years ago

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.

katmannthree2• 4 years ago

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).

agilob2• 4 years ago

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.

katmannthree2• 4 years ago

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.

zozbot2342• 4 years ago

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.

agilob2• 4 years ago

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

formerly_proven2• 4 years ago

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

thederf• 4 years ago

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.

raytube• 4 years ago

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.

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

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