GNOME's Nautilus Could See Big Improvements, New Image Viewer Coming Into Focus

[phoronix]

Phoronix: GNOME's Nautilus Could See Big Improvements. New Image Viewer Coming Into Focus

GNOME developer Chris Davis has laid out plans for at least some of the work items he and other open-source developers hope to accomplish for GNOME 43 and future releases...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GNOME-43-And-Beyond-Ideas

[caligula]

Why rust? Doesn't gnome use their c# / glib abomation called vala just to ensure it wouldn't be compatible with any other tech?

[RahulSundaram]

Why rust? Doesn't gnome use their c# / glib abomation called vala just to ensure it wouldn't be compatible with any other tech?

Quite the opposite. They used Vala precisely because it uses gobject and compiles down to C and therefore maintains the broad compatibility with rest of the ecosystem. They have eagerly adopted Rust when it became clear Rust provided a good alternative for them while maintaining the same compatibility using Rust's FFI. Outside of Firefox, librsvg, part of the GNOME project was an early adopter of Rust and proved out the model very well.

[tildearrow]

Was that dot in the title intended?

[Volta]

File chooser would love to get some tuning..

[david-nk]

Nautilus really must be one of the worst pieces of open source software ever written. First we have the 0.5-1 second delay for displaying contents of a folder, which might be appropriate when accessing a FTP share hosted in the Australian outback on 28.8k modem, but not when accessing your local SSD. Then Nautilus only gradually adds files to the listing, after it has accessed each file to figure out what file type it is and/or until it has loaded the thumbnail from the cache or created it. That is a stupid behavior which means you can wait up to one minute until you can finally browse the directory contents. Several minutes for remotely hosted shares. And when a folder exceeds 10,000 files, it completely collapses. For a folder of 100,000+ files it may freeze for hours every time you enter or leave a directory, sometimes only to crash when it's halfway done.

Besides the abysmal performance, no useful features have been added to it, only features removed. Most file managers these days allow files and folders to be marked with custom colors, but of course Nautilus still does not. Even Windows Explorer will probably have the feature long before Nautilus does.

So rewriting Baobab is a little weird, it's already a perfectly fast, reliable and useful tool. Nautilus is a much better candidate for a rewrite from scratch, be it in Rust or something else. Though admittedly it's also a bigger project than Baobab.

[zexelon]

Yeeaaaahhhh... I think Nautilus... and GVFSd need to be set on fire... dumped in the deepest part of the ocean and forgotten by humanity. I tried so hard in the last couple of months to give Gnome an honest go... this past week for some completely uknown reason gvfsd started writing endless streams of "to many files open" garbage to syslog... while I was working on my machine remotely the syslog file reached 95Gb in size... and consumed all the space in the drive. No amount of google search could find an answer for this one... it only happens if I have a Nautilus window open for an extended amount of time.

In the end, I am back to KDE on X11... because when I try KDE on Wayland, the whole system hard locks... Linux is so delightful some times.

[cl333r]

Nautilus really must be one of the worst pieces of open source software ever written. First we have the 0.5-1 second delay for displaying contents of a folder .

That was my number one reason to create my own file browser and was wondering why no one pays attention to it... and while my FB lists files fast(er) and been using it by default for months, it still has a ton of bugs and incomplete features.

[david-nk]

That was my number one reason to create my own file browser and was wondering why no one pays attention to it... and while my FB lists files fast(er) and been using it by default for months, it still has a ton of bugs and incomplete features.

If it reaches a decent state, it would be great if you posted it on Github, it would be good to have more alternative file managers and it also gives people the chance to contribute if they want to.

I nearly started my own file manager, but fortunately at the time I discovered Marlin (which later got forked as Pantheon Files), which doesn't have most of the problems Nautilus has, so I just decided to add my own patches to Marlin in order to suit my preferences.

[Shiba]

So with that much Rust I can now expect to at least double the compilation time of everything? Looking forward to it.