Nautilus Begins To Change For GNOME 3.0

While GNOME 3.0 will not be released until September 2010, many of the GNOME packages are beginning to change in preparation for this major overhaul of the GNOME desktop even though the GNOME 2.30 release is still ahead of us. While Zeitgeist, G-Streamer, Clutter/Mutter, and GNOME Shell grab most of the attention, the mature Nautilus file-browser is receiving some improvements too.

Nautilus 2.29.1 was released today with some of the first changes in preparation for GNOME 3.0. One of the first changes made is disabling by default the spatial view mode for Nautilus and enabling the browser mode by default. This is exciting news for people (including I) that really hate the Nautilus spatial view mode (such as is used by default in Fedora) and prefer the Nautilus mode that is used by default in other distributions (i.e. openSUSE and Ubuntu). The Nautilus developers are also deciding to what extent Nautilus should support desktop icons and other desktop actions with GNOME Shell taking over much of those responsibilities.

Many more details can be found in the Nautilus 2.29.1 announcement and this mailing list post goes over in detail what is being considered for GNOME 3.0 with Nautilus.