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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 wit

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.

flatiron 4y ago
Was the nautilus business plan 1) create file manager 2) ? 3) profit!
- AceJohnny2 4y ago
  Nautilus was just one component of Eazel's general push for a business-ready Linux desktop.
  - anthk 4y ago
    Helix Gnome?
- diskzero 4y 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.
  - flatiron 4y ago
    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.
candiddevmike 4y ago
Thank you for creating Nautilis, I've been using it since 2006. Just out of curiosity, what DE do you use these days?
- diskzero 4y 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.
  - mardifoufs 4y ago
    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!
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    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!
    - diskzero 4y ago
      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?
      - smoldesu 4y ago
        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.
alyandon 4y 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.
digisign 4y 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.
- diskzero 4y 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!
  - matheusmoreira 4y ago
    > 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.
  - digisign 4y ago
    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.
Shorel 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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.
  - anthk 4y ago
    Rox Filer is what Nautilus should've been. Blazing fast, good console/terminal integration, RoxLib.
Jiejeing 4y 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).
- mardifoufs 4y 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
  - viraptor 4y ago
    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.
eternityforest 4y ago
It seems like Linux Mint is exactly that entity now. They do a wonderful job with largely gnome derived apps.

flatiron 4y ago

Was the nautilus business plan 1) create file manager 2) ? 3) profit!

AceJohnny2 4y ago
Nautilus was just one component of Eazel's general push for a business-ready Linux desktop.
- anthk 4y ago
  Helix Gnome?
diskzero 4y 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.
- flatiron 4y ago
  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.

candiddevmike 4y ago

Thank you for creating Nautilis, I've been using it since 2006. Just out of curiosity, what DE do you use these days?

diskzero 4y 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.
- mardifoufs 4y ago
  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!
- smoldesu 4y ago
  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!
  - diskzero 4y ago
    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?
    - smoldesu 4y ago
      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.

alyandon 4y 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.

digisign 4y 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.

diskzero 4y 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!
- matheusmoreira 4y ago
  > 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.
- digisign 4y ago
  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.

Shorel 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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.
- anthk 4y ago
  Rox Filer is what Nautilus should've been. Blazing fast, good console/terminal integration, RoxLib.

Jiejeing 4y 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).

mardifoufs 4y 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
- viraptor 4y ago
  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.

eternityforest 4y ago

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