Plenty of really good products come from companies that go out of business, and Nautilus was one of them. It drove the Linux desktop experience forward by about

Plenty of really good products come from companies that go out of business, and Nautilus was one of them. It drove the Linux desktop experience forward by about a decade – from Apple c. 1993 to Apple c. 2003, as flippant as that sounds. I switched to Linux on the desktop for a couple years largely on the strength of Nautilus. I eventually gave up and went to OS X (conveniently if accidentally using Linux to skip most of Apple’s rough OS transition period) when it became clear that, although there were some brilliant people on the Gnome team and elsewhere,* Nautilus and its approach was being left for dead. Instead, there were five years of stagnant file managers with pseudo-Aqua pinstripe themes. But Nautilus gets a lot of credit for trying. * For example, http://www.tigert.com/ http://www.tigert.com/ was a graphic artist who come up with some really elegant interface stuff.