6 ms·
The GNOME developers removed it.
- thex86 13y agohttp://xfce.org/ http://xfce.org/ It's never too late...
- thepicard 13y agoI think you mean http://mate-desktop.org/ http://mate-desktop.org/
- thex86 13y agoNot exactly, given that Mate is not packaged with Debian. But yes, if your distribution ships it, then it's a good choice.
- D9u 13y agoNo, you're both adding too much bloat: http://dwm.suckless.org/ http://dwm.suckless.org/
- javert 13y agoIn all seriousness, I find it much nicer to use a lightweight WM and install/configure exactly what I need, than have something generic that I don't understand as well (i.e., "desktop environment").
- gee_totes 13y agoActually, I've been using Xmonad+Gnome for almost a year now and am super happy with it. If you're willing to leave the false abstraction of stackable "windows" behind in the quest for maximum productivity, I suggest you give it a shot.
- gluxon 13y agoI'm a fan of Ubuntu Unity and compiz, but everyone is going to yell at me. :(
- keithpeter 13y agoI rather like Unity (12.04 LTS edition) on a 1080p monitor. I find it difficult on a smaller screen (e.g. 1280/768) so I use Ubuntustudio 13.04 which comes with XFCE4 in a rather nice implementation on my thinkpad. I'm sitting out 13.04 Unity because of the LibreOffice menu highlighting and shortcut bugs. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libreoffice/+bug/739184 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libreoffice/+bug/7...
- obviouslygreen 13y agoI used to run GNOME on my workstations and XCFE on my first netbook (Asus Eee 701) before switching everything over to openbox... the latter has gotten me so used to right-click-for-everything that using GNOME or Windows requires a minute of concerted effort to remember how most of the rest of the world does things. [edit: However, I still use Nautilus, and thanks to the article this thread discusses I'll likely now have to switch that out... oh well. I was switching from barebones Ubuntu to Debian anyway thanks to Canonical's growing nuttery.]
- gluxon 13y agoI thought this was interesting and very similar to the situation that's happening here. http://witchofbontemps.wordpress.com/2013/05/05/an-artist-has-a-right-to-create-exactly-what-they-want-but-is-that-always-wise/ http://witchofbontemps.wordpress.com/2013/05/05/an-artist-ha...
- nvr219 13y agoReal men use fluxbox ;-)
- krtk 13y agoHonest question; I used fluxbox for some time. As a minimalist I loved it in the beginning. But, as soon as I started using it for developing/coding I did not find it intuitive at all. I, especially, found it hard to manage multiple windows. Now I'm on Gnome and the combination of plank and the panel makes it amazing to work on. I'm relatively new to Linux and installed fluxbox over Mint 14. Also, I don't exclusively use the terminal. How are you able to manage it on fluxbox?
- mtct 13y agoThis has become a joke, luckily we have xfce.
- guard-of-terra 13y agoYou can always go KDE. In file management however, Dolphin is still an awkward kid compared to Konqueror, but hey, it's still there.
- Elv13 13y agoDolphin is probably the best file manager out there. The grouped view and meta data sorting is something that was really missing in the old Konqueror (and every other FM on Linux). The new (4.8+) display engine speed, agility and animations are also quite amazing. Of course, as I developer, I enjoyed more than once Konqueror ability to open everything inline (from remote servers), but this is not missing from Dolphin. You can still use KIO, tabs and (limited) splits. The interface is overall better. Not being able to open files inline is not very relevant (Okular is there for that).
- adamors 13y ago> Dolphin is still an awkward kid compared to Konqueror Are you kidding? Dolphin is probably the best graphical file manager in existence. It's streets ahead of anything on Linux, OS X or Windows. The only thing I miss on OS X is actually Dolphin.
- guard-of-terra 13y agoWell, it has no menu and I have trouble typing KIO urls into it. Maybe I'm old school?
- anonymous 13y ago1. Every kde application has a menu and if it's hidden you can show it with ctrl-m (alright, not the most discoverable shortcut, but it is there) 2. Press the "control" button on the toolbar for a menu when hidden. 3. You're right about KIO urls. Dolphin is also very fast. Even if you have enabled thumbnails for files and open a folder containing thousands of images it shows all files instantly and loads up the thumbnails in the background. I can't remember Nautilus ever doing it like that, though in fairness I stopped using Gnome when 2.2 took away the "launch terminal" option from the desktop's context menu.
- pervycreeper 13y agoGenuine question: Why is the GNOME project still dominant, when they consistently make arbitrary changes and refuse to listen to their users?
- Elv13 13y agoWhy was Microsoft dominant from Windows ME to the release of Win7? Why: It is hard to break a dominant position when they enjoy 2 order of magnitude more corporate support than their closest rivals.
- nknighthb 13y agoI'm not sure what you're getting at. Are you saying every operating system Microsoft released after Win98SE and before Windows 7 was on the same level as ME? Have you forgotten about 2000 and XP?
- Elv13 13y agoSecurity wise and feature wise, they were. Stability got better, but even KDE2 was better at that point in time. Same goes for IE6 vs. Netscape Navigator/Mozilla Suite. Once they got to the top and locked the corporate lock, it was over. It took years or awesomeness until Firefox got big
- nknighthb 13y agoI'm sorry, I'm not at all sure how to respond to this comment. It aligns not at all with the world I experienced between 2000 and 2009. From my viewpoint, each non-ME desktop/workstation iteration of Windows during that period -- 2000, XP, and Vista and their service packs -- provided significant advancement in security and features, even if in Vista's case, the total package was arguably undesirable. The comparison to what has happened with GNOME seems particularly off-base, since Microsoft was not actively seeking to destroy existing workflows and pitch anyone -- power user or not -- overboard. On the contrary, their fanatical devotion to backward compatibility largely remained and paid great dividends, as it has for ~30 years. I say this not as someone who has any need to defend Microsoft, by the way. My livelihood has never substantially depended on anything Microsoft-related, and my own first choice of productivity OS was Linux by the late 90s, and OS X by 2006. Your apparent worldview simply cannot be reconciled with my own experiences. It's as if you'd said what a lovely shade of puce the clear blue sky was.
- CoryG89 13y agoI upgraded my 12.10 Gnome REMIX to 13.04 Ubuntu Gnome when it prompted me during my regular software updates, it f*cked up everything on my system. Figured there would be changes, didn't know it would be this bad.
- EdiX 13y agoJust a few more features to discard and Nautilus will finally reach feature parity with dfm.
- shitlord 13y agoAs a non-artist, I can never even hope to understand the complex design choices that the GNOME developers make. http://i.imgur.com/VXwiUdU.png http://i.imgur.com/VXwiUdU.png
- keithpeter 13y agoThat appears to be the Unity desktop in Ubuntu. The full Gnome 3 experience is different and does not have the duplication from the global menu.
- tlitd 13y agoHis point was to show the Nautilus toolbar
- andor 13y agoAs Nautilus has been horribly slow for a long time, I switched to PCManFM, the file manager of LXDE. It integrates well with GNOME, and is pretty much full-featured. There's also a status bar ;-) The only weird thing is that in the "detailed list view", the sort order cannot be changed by clicking the column headers.
- vanderZwan 13y agoThat's odd, I'm on a netbook running Lubuntu right now and I can do that. Have you tried filing a bug?
- andor 13y agoIt seems to be a known bug in PCManFM 1.1.0. Ubuntu 12.10 ships with version 1.0.1, which is unaffected. http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=3583229&group_id=156956&atid=801864 http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=3583229&...
- vanderZwan 13y agoWhat about 13.04, which is what I'm running?
- gizmo686 13y agoThanks for the pointer, I just switch to PCManFM. Anyway, using the version in Ubuntu 12.10 can sort by clicking on the column headers. Also, as someone who does not use a full DE, I appreciate the fact that the defualt is not to start managed the desktop when you start PCManFM, as opposed to Nautilus which defaults to managing the desktop when you open it. I still don't get why managing the desktop is always the same program as the file explorer, but Windows does the same thing, so their might be some deeper reason than 'becuase nautilus is doing it'
- olgeni 13y agohttp://rox.sourceforge.net/desktop/ROX-Filer http://rox.sourceforge.net/desktop/ROX-Filer
- D9u 13y agoI don't use a file manager, as the command line does what I need without adding a bunch of stuff I don't need nor want.
- eagsalazar2 13y agoI'd love to see what percentage of linux desktop users actually use gnome anymore. It would be especially interesting to see a graph of how that has changed over time. My intuition is that they went from almost total dominance a few years ago to total irrelevance now (< 2%).
- return0 13y agoYep, let's find out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5730142 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5730142
- maheart 13y ago<2% is a little rich. GNOME (not GNOME shell) is still the default in: Ubuntu (although admittedly less as time goes on), Debian, Fedora, Mint. All very big distros. If you mean GNOME Shell, I still find <2% hard to believe, as its still the default on Debian and Fedora.
- static_typed 13y agoI feel sorry for the Gnome guys - they get crucified if they do or don't advance the platform, yet look across and see other fruit flavoured platforms pull worse on their user base yet their fan base not only approves of it, but they somehow justify in the most Stockholm syndrome walled garden kind of way.
- riffraff 13y agoI think users complained quite a lot for tiny changes in OSX such as inversion-of-scrolling-gesture, new expose behaviour, mission control, and plenty more. But I don't remember apple removing many features from the finder or changing the menu bar since OSX was launched, so I think your simile is misaimed.
- raverbashing 13y ago"see other fruit flavoured platforms pull worse on their user base" No vague assertions, please be more specific "yet their fan base not only approves of it, but they somehow justify" Coincidentally their "fan base" is composed of several people with design and user experience knowledge (in various degrees) so I believe their acceptance of things has a basis. (And it doesn't mean they accept everything) Edit: as an example quoted by the other commenter, inversion of scrolling direction was a big change. But it is configurable, so you can always go back The natural scrolling makes sense if you're using a trackpad, but for a scroll wheel it's awful
- demallien 13y agoI've said this before here, but Apple have really concentrated on the laptop experience at the expense of the desktop experience. Which is understandable if you look at their sales figures. I was using a Mac Mini when I first upgraded to Mountain Lion, and really wasn't a big fan. Then I got a Macbook Air, and all of a sudden all of the modifications made sense. Things like the fact that they have optimised the OS for SSDs - which you find in laptops, not desktops. But that optimisation makes hard-drive based Macs much much slower than they were before. Or the fullscreen interface which works really well when you can do a three finger swipe to swap between screens, but not so well if you have a mouse.
- buster 13y agoSo 2 years after the appearance of Gnome Shell someone still doesn't get that Gnome tries to simplify the whole interface and that Gnome has been trying to create a simple interface for the majority of people for many many years. Big news. Good thing is you have alternatives from MATE to KDE, Xfce, E17, etc. etc. It's not like you're forced to use Nautilus either. Personally i never understood the hatred towards change. In the beginning of Gnome 3 it was really extreme and now it's slowly getting better (with the complaints) because people become accustomed to it. It's GOOD that Gnome tries to make it simple, because we all wish for a Linux computer our parents could use. That's just not going to happen with the options-and-complex-information everywhere approach. After all Gnome Shell isn't that bad and i'm sure a guy posting on HN who uses Linux on his Desktop has the skills to check his available diskspace without the status bar ;)
- mynegation 13y agoWhat _I_ don't get is how removal of type-ahead find, compact view and backspace to parent is making it simpler for users. I consider these the most basic features of any sane file manager. One more confirmation that switching to XFCE was the right thing to do.
- dylan-m 13y agoI worry that you're still using Nautilus 3.6, which was definitely an interim version of Nautilus. If you check out 3.8, you'll see that type-ahead search is very much there, and better than ever — especially if you happen to have Tracker installed :) The key difference is it's effectively a file search that is easy to back out of, so it only shows files that match your input. Personally, I find that makes it a lot easier to flip between a bunch of files with similar names, and it's making me really like search — which I had never really used before. It'll search recursively, but the files from the current folder are listed first, so it's harder to get lost among them than it sounds. (And I think there might be something on the roadmap to list files from the current folder and from elsewhere under a separate heading, but I could be mixing that up with something else).
- samastur 13y ago
- viseztrance 13y agoIn the past I was a rather hardcore kde user, but I've been using gnome shell for almost two years and I actually like it. Initially I used all sorts of extensions to make it behave more like a traditional desktop, but over time I grew fond of the defaults. And in fairness, they did add something else http://i.stack.imgur.com/NiggU.png http://i.stack.imgur.com/NiggU.png (last comment in the parent link).
- jmhain 13y agoI never see anybody complaining about removal of features from epiphany (the gnome web browser). That's probably because everybody knows it's intended to be a simple, featureless browser for those who don't need something more powerful. If you need features, you install Chrome or Firefox, and all the other core apps are no different. If gnome-terminal isn't enough for you, install terminator. If nautilus isn't enough, install one of the others mentioned here. If the shell doesn't do something you need it to do, find or write an extension. I actually think the gnome way of doing things is perfect.
- cyphax 13y agoI can see where you're coming from and I agree to a certain point. However, I think the file manager is such an important tool; oversimplifying it and making it hard to use is not a good idea. I loved Gnome 2.6; it is probably my favorite desktop environment. It felt like a great balance of simplicity and features that make my life easier. So I find that taking that away bit by bit isn't working for me. I don't really want to have two of every app because Gnome's default is too awkward or lacks some pretty basic features.
- PommeDeTerre 13y agoDoes anyone actually use Epiphany these days, though? I can see people not complaining about changes to it if it isn't really being used by anyone at all.
- edtechdev 13y agoIf you are using Ubuntu, here is how to install the Nemo file manager, which is from Linux Mint and based off of Gnome 3.4 before things were removed: http://www.webupd8.org/2012/12/how-to-install-nemo-file-manager-in.html http://www.webupd8.org/2012/12/how-to-install-nemo-file-mana... I've been using standard Ubuntu as my sole OS for over 6 years now. I'm most likely switching to Linux Mint or Xubuntu when I get a chance.