Linux and Compiz fusion being let down

[kyokan]

Does anyone feel that while Compiz fusion adds fantastic 3D effects to your desktop (that I use all the time), Linux (in particular Gnome) just feels somehow... dated? I think I've narrowed down what the main culprit is - Nautilus. Let's face it Nautilus is nought but the most basic of file managers, when compared to the looks of Vista's explorer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Windows_Vista_Explorer.png

or Leopard's QuickLook in the finder http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e3/Coverflowquicklook.jpg/180px-Coverflowquicklook.jpg
I think the fellows over at gnome really need to pull their socks up at this point, because with Compiz Fusion coming as standard on Ubuntu installations now Nautilus is holding back the rest of the OS.

Support for video/screensaver wallpapers or a different wallpapers for virtual desktops would be nice too!

[delfick]

I think the fellows over at gnome really need to pull their socks up at this point

that's why they're making gtk+ which is composite aware :D

Support for video/screensaver wallpapers or a different wallpapers for virtual desktops would be nice too!

do a forum search for that

it is possible but you have to compile nautilus from source with some patches so that you have the icons as well....

also I'm moving this to linux talk subforum....

[azathothgr]

I can see what you mean about finder, but vista's explorer doesn't seem that advanced. I haven't used it personally, I've seen only screenshots, but it looks pretty basic, and very similar to nautilus. The only thing that's interesting is the details pane. Oh and what's with the column titles in an 'icons' view?

[AdeBe]

But Dolphin from KDE is, for example, advanced file manager. It's not the right way that you have to recompile Nautilus with some patches to get some functionality. It should be standard.

[adamk]

But Dolphin from KDE is, for example, advanced file manager. It's not the right way that you have to recompile Nautilus with some patches to get some functionality. It should be standard.

It will be sooner or later.

Adam

[Oasisgames]

I can see what you mean about finder, but vista's explorer doesn't seem that advanced. I haven't used it personally, I've seen only screenshots, but it looks pretty basic, and very similar to nautilus. The only thing that's interesting is the details pane. Oh and what's with the column titles in an 'icons' view?
It is very basic, I can say from experience that Nautilus is just as good, if not better than Vista's file explorer.

[shafin]

The only thing I missed from Vista's explorer is the breadcrumb address Bar.
Nautilus is not extremely powerful,and it was designed that way,so not to confuse the user with too much power.

[metastability]

Nautilus is not extremely powerful,and it was designed that way,so not to confuse the user with too much power.

You can add more functionality in Ubuntu through the package manager or write scripts yourself.

What I don't understand is how nautilus can take ~100Mb virtual memory and still refresh a list of files so slowly.

Does anyone feel that while Compiz fusion adds fantastic 3D effects to your desktop (that I use all the time), Linux (in particular Gnome) just feels somehow... dated?
My general Linux feeling is that it still has a long way to go.

I would guess that the rate of development of projects is increasing and the people coding for the projects are becoming more aware of their respected interfaces (due to a larger user-base).

I would also guess that GNOME has angered many people over lots of things from menu editing (alacarte, slow, lacking features, with many bugs/also adding many items, not scaling list size), no access to backgound pixmap in nautilus without root by default, to the system monitor icon disappearing all of a sudden, to unscalable icons (volume), weird (but isolated) problems involving disabling of the shutdown box.

However, even after all that complaining about a series of minor bugs I encountered, I still prefer it to use GNOME over KDE because it feels better and runs smoother. I think that the panels are cleaner in GNOME and they have done a lot right.

To wrap up this long reply, maybe wait till Heron for the operating system as a whole to compete against the others more evenly - that's my opinion.

[Deciare]

... Don't forget the ugly and unusable file dialogues. They're Gtk's fault, but GNOME uses them, so yeah. :p

KDE4's file dialogues aren't so hot, either, with several features that I valued in KDE3's file dialogues--such as the thumbnailing icon view--missing outright. But at least it's better than the Gtk variant's dreadfully counter-intuitive auto-completion and inconsistent reaction to the user entering a directory name into the location field.

And I also hate how I can't just select any arbitrary file from the wallpaper chooser. Having a list of favourite images is fine, but why force me to include every potential wallpaper image into the list before even being able to sample it?

Don't even get me started on how there's no central location to change file type associations... I don't consider it fun to hunt all over my hard drive for a file with the type I want to reassociate just so I can right-click on it from Nautilus. I don't even use GNOME as my primary DE, so it makes little sense that I'd need to start GNOME's file manager to change Firefox's default action for a given file type.

GNOME has the potential to be so much better if it stops making assumptions about how its users should work and start thinking about how users already work or want to work instead.

Linux and its applications feels perfectly modern to me for the most part. I don't feel that their capabilities are limiting to me. What is limiting is all the user-interface gotchas that require me to go through so many steps to actually access those capabilities. I don't care~ about efficient workflows or usability studies or what. I care about being able to do what I want in the way I consider most direct.