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?

  • Sean TilleyEnglish
    6·
    1 year 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·
      1 year 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 I guess you are using an older (LTS) version of ubuntu that uses an outdated version of GTK.