Nautilus, the Gnome file assistant manager, sucks utter donkeyballs. Let us make an unordered list of the ways:

  • If the underlying filesystem changes, say a copy operation, the file manager view does not update without a manual refresh by CTL+R. This leaves the view in a stale state, presenting false file information to the user, who might never know until they do something bad. This is a showstopper bug that’s been hanging around since forever.

  • Batch rename. Good luck trying to rename a series of files ordered sequentially by number, if the number happens to start with any number other than one. A sequence from 2 to x is impossible to batch rename. Because regex in sed never worked either. No, wait. It’s always worked! For like, 50 years.

  • Why, when moving a collection of files or a directory within the same filesystem, does it actually perform a copy and delete operation, taking cpu and time, when the inode location could just be updated like mv does?

  • Thumbnails? Why do they take longer to generate for images and video than than the totality of the existence of the universe?

Nautilus is an unusable mess. If command line file utils were this bad, we’d never be able to reliably store and manipulate files. Who in their right mind actually uses this junk?

  • Knusper@feddit.de
    54·
    8 months ago

    I also find it incredible, that there’s no GUI button to edit the path. You have to just kind of know that Ctrl+L does that…

    • uzay@infosec.pub
      10·
      8 months ago

      I don’t have any of OP’s issues, but this one! I hate it! Especially on the Steam Deck

    • lolcatnip@reddthat.comEnglish
      6·
      8 months ago

      Don’t worry, it’s documented on the second tab of options in an unrelated dialog box, so anyone who needs it should know where to find it.

      • Knusper@feddit.de
        21·
        8 months ago

        In Dolphin, you can click to the right of the path, like you would in a textbox.

        I admit, it’s not the most intuitive method either, but when you hover your mouse there, it does change over to a text editing cursor, shows a caret-like line to the right of the path and will eventually throw up a tooltip that you can “Click to Edit Location”…

  • Teon@kbin.social
    411·
    8 months ago

    Come to the dark side, KDE has Dolphin and it swims faster than any gnome could.

  • Treeniks@lemmy.ml
    381·
    8 months ago

    Personally I never understood why file managers in linux refuse to do operations that require privileges. Guess what, if I have Nautilus open and want to move files into, let’s say, /usr/local, I don’t want to have to switch to the terminal to do so if I already have the stuff copied within nautilus. On Windows, I just get an admin password prompt if I try to do naughty stuff. On Linux, we have the whole polkit system, but no file manager seems to ever use it. Tbf, this is not a nautilus problem, as no file manager seems to do this.

      • Matthew@lemmy.ca
        2·
        8 months ago

        Oh wow you can? I just switched to Nemo on Arch after using Thunar for a long time but I got annoyed at it for crashing a lot when I copy files to my FTP server. Very good to know!

    • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
      7·
      8 months ago

      I think KDE tries to use Polkit for some places.

      For Nautilus, theres nautilus-admin. Many distros have this either available in their repositories, or installed by default.

      Alternatively, navigate to admin:///usr/local (I believe this is exactly what nautilus-admin does, though it was started from the GUI).

      • Treeniks@lemmy.ml
        8·
        8 months ago

        I’m aware of nautilus-admin, but not only is it not maintained, imho it should be part of nautilus by default, and it has to open a new nautilus window when you use it. What I want is to drag and drop files to /usr/local and then get a password prompt to do the move. With nautilus-admin, I need to have the foresight to use “Open as admin” when going into /usr/local, but if I had that foresight then I might as well just start nautilus as root to begin with. Usually I just want to look into the folder, and only then realize I need to change something, which means a good old “go back up one folder, then search the local folder again, then right click, search for ‘Open as admin’, then get thrown into a new window, completely disorienting myself in the process”.

        • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
          2·
          8 months ago

          I agree that this should be done better. I’m not sure why it’s not implemented, I guess not enough people care about this for a programmer to pick this up. I have to admit I myself am not interested enough to put in the effort to come up with a fix for this.

          In theory it should just be “no write access, attempt opening admin://$PWD and retry drop action”.

    • 404@lemmy.zip
      5·
      8 months ago

      In Thunar it’s just right-click and “Open as root”

      I really like Thunar

  • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
    361·
    8 months ago

    I don’t recognise the issues you run into. I have my own annoyances with Nautilus (the need to install nautilus-admin to be able to navigate to admin:// paths and the need to hit either / or ctrl+l to edit the file path) but none as severe as yours.

    If the underlying filesystem changes, say a copy operation, the file manager view does not update without a manual refresh by CTL+R. This leaves the view in a stale state, presenting false file information to the user, who might never know until they do something bad. This is a showstopper bug that’s been hanging around since forever.

    I don’t know what you’re talking about, on my machine directories get updated as copy/move operations are completed.

    Personally I find auto update behaviour very annoying to be honest, but I can’t turn it off. Stuff randomly jumping around always irks me, I wish file managers would just show a little button saying “the contents of this folder changed, click here to refresh” instead of changing the directory under my mouse as I double click.

    Why, when moving a collection of files or a directory within the same filesystem, does it actually perform a copy and delete operation, taking cpu and time, when the inode location could just be updated like mv does?

    This line of code sets the “do not copy+delete when move is natively supported” flag. Based on this code, that should only happen when files are moved between different file systems (or network drives, or whatever). Collections of files are calling the move-aware method in a loop. Sounds like you’re hitting a bug? Are you using some kind of virtual filesystem or something?

    Thumbnails? Why do they take longer to generate for images and video than than the totality of the existence of the universe?

    AFAIK thumbnails are generated through subprocesses inside a sandbox, stored in a central cache. I can’t say that I’ve run into this except when thumbnails are generated for huge video files, but if your system is under load I can imagine the overhead from forking processes causing slowdowns. Nautilus uses a pluggable standard for thumbnail generation engines, so if Dolphin were to use the same standard, you could configure the Dolphin thumbnailer for Gnome and get KDE’s performance. Dolphin doesn’t seem to support that type of thumbnailing, though (they have their own Qt based interface), so you may need to write a wrapper for the KDE source code if you want to try that.

    KDE doesn’t seem to do any sandboxing for thumbnailers, perhaps that’s why it’s faster?

    As for batch rename, I’ve never used it, so I can’t comment on it. I tried to do it in Dolphin once, but I didn’t understand what kind of formats and options the popup wanted from me so I resorted to using the command line.

      • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
        4·
        8 months ago

        Ah, so the file overview issue was fixed a few months ago. Two weeks from initial report to upstream fix + downstream package release doesn’t seem too bad to be honest.

        Now I understand what you meant by the bulk rename. I must admit that I never even knew this feature existed before you mentioned it here. It’s rather disappointing to see the lack of activity on that issue, as it shouldn’t be too difficult a fix. However, I don’t know Gnome’s road map, I wouldn’t know what their current priorities are. They seem to have been working hard on long standing issues (after decades, the file picker has thumbnails!) which was a welcome surprise, so perhaps they’ll pick this issue up along the way.

        • Paranoid Factoid@beehaw.orgOPEnglish
          4·
          8 months ago

          That view bug has been sitting around since 2009, from what I can gather. But a file manager giving false filesystem state to a user is a showstopper. It violates the main purpose of the program. And risks data loss. Users may make errors based on false information.

          Batch renaming I use regularly by ingesting media from cameras, though typically at the command line.

  • penquin@lemm.ee
    19·
    8 months ago

    I honestly can never imagine Linux without KDE plasma. It has its flaws for sure, but at least I can modify the shit out of it to force it to meet my needs 100%.

    • CrabAndBroom@lemmy.ml
      81·
      8 months ago

      Yeah every once in a while I see a screenshot of GNOME that looks really nice and get tempted to try it again, and usually within a day or two I’m back to KDE lol.

      No shade to people who like to use GNOME, but it’s really not for me.

      • penquin@lemm.ee
        71·
        8 months ago

        Absolutely. Gnome is becoming gorgeous, but its workflow is not for me. Also, all the missing things that I have to add extensions for is just not ideal. I just re-create the gnome theme in kde when I miss gnome. or just install it in a VM and enjoy for for a little while. Otherwise, kde has always been where I belong.

      • penquin@lemm.ee
        2·
        8 months ago

        I would use it if it supported 4k better. Every time I set the resolution to 4k and the scaling to 2x, the whole UI gets jacked up and something can’t be clicked anymore. Window bars stay really small. The panel gets all messed up. That’s basically on every single distribution I’ve tried with xfce

  • JokeDeity@lemm.ee
    11·
    8 months ago

    I don’t even use Linux, but isn’t copying and deleting files to simply move them, like super bad in the long run for data integrity?

  • mr_strange@discuss.tchncs.de
    101·
    8 months ago

    It’s crazy crazy sort order that I can’t stand. They deliberately go in and remove certain characters from the filename, specifically to make the sorting behave weirdly.

  • maeries@feddit.de
    91·
    8 months ago

    If the underlying filesystem changes, say a copy operation, the file manager view does not update without a manual refresh by CTL+R. This leaves the view in a stale state, presenting false file information to the user, who might never know until they do something bad. This is a showstopper bug that’s been hanging around since forever.

    I don’t know what you mean. If a open my Downloads folder and then download something, it shows up in Nautilus without refreshing anything

    Batch rename. Good luck trying to rename a series of files ordered sequentially by number, if the number happens to start with any number other than one. A sequence from 2 to x is impossible to batch rename. Because regex in sed never worked either. No, wait. It’s always worked! For like, 50 years.

    I mean at least there is a batch rename function unlike in windows

    Why, when moving a collection of files or a directory within the same filesystem, does it actually perform a copy and delete operation, taking cpu and time, when the inode location could just be updated like mv does?

    Again, I can’t reproduce it. I can move many GB instantly using ctrl + x and ctrl + v

    The only thing that really annoys me with Nautilus is that you can’t type in the directory path you want to open except using ctrl + L. In the hamburger menu there even is an option to copy the path. Why not make one more to edit it? Or replace copy with edit, because when editing you can also copy it anyway

  • Sean Tilley@lemmy.mlEnglish
    6·
    8 months ago

    The one that really irks me now is that Nautilus in Ubuntu doesn’t show thumbnails for PNG images in the file selection dialog. It’s such an ass-backwards change that I’m legitimately shocked.

    • d_k_bo@feddit.de
      4·
      8 months ago
      1. The file selection dialog is not a part of Nautilus. It is either a provided by the toolkit (e.g. Qt, GTK3, GTK4) or by a xdg-desktop-portal implementation. The GTK4 file chooser that is also used by GNOME’s portal implementation supports thumbnails since December 2022 or GNOME 44.
      2. I guess you are using an older (LTS) version of ubuntu that uses an outdated version of GTK.
  • onlinepersona@programming.devEnglish
    71·
    8 months ago

    So, gnome is an alternative desktop environment and it’s great that they exist. If they inspired Apple’s UI or the other way around, doesn’t matter but they are the Apple UI of Linux. Mac users switching to Linux can have a somewhat familiar experience.

    That said, their “we know better than you what you want, luser” attitude makes it hard for me not to grin when someone rants about their stuff. It shouldn’t, because they are probably mostly unpaid contributors and their work should be valued, but once in a while…

    • miss_brainfart@lemmy.ml
      3·
      8 months ago

      I like Thunar, but it doesn’t display the thumbnails I specifically embedded into my video files. Is that even possible?

        • miss_brainfart@lemmy.ml
          2·
          8 months ago

          I set those limits, I made sure all the plugins to do with thumbnailing are there, and so on. I’m genuinely not sure anymore if it even can work like I want it to.

          Whatever I do, Thunar shows an arbitrary frame of the video as its thumbnail, not the embedded one.

            • miss_brainfart@lemmy.ml
              2·
              8 months ago

              Thunar shows the 33.33% duration frame of any video that it can process

              Yeah, that seems to check out. If I research it, I’m not really finding any conclusive evidence that Thunar can actually show embedded thumbnails, so idk

  • ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca
    21·
    8 months ago

    There isn’t an alternative to Gnome, nothing looks the same

    And if I use a fork of it then eventually that won’t look as good because it’s not run by the Gnome devs

    • Paranoid Factoid@beehaw.orgOPEnglish
      43·
      8 months ago

      I’m not a fan of either Gnome or KDE.

      To me, the big mistake both make is in the presumption the UI and utilities shipped with those platforms are why people use it. But no. Nobody uses MacOS because of its nifty calculator or the Finder. It’s the overall toolkit integration with apps. Not even look and feel. But consistency in use.

      Neither KDE nor Gnome offer that.

        • Paranoid Factoid@beehaw.orgOPEnglish
          3·
          8 months ago

          I don’t presume to know why others choose to use anything. But MacOS is highly consistent across apps. Dialog boxes, text input forms, file browsing, hot keys, all the same across applications.

          • ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca
            01·
            8 months ago

            Oh so you mean being a closed eco-system

            I feel a lot of devs would be upset if they were told they can only develop using GTK for example