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Nautilus considered a nuisance.

Posted Apr 1, 2010 17:04 UTC (Thu) by ovitters (subscriber, #27950)
In reply to: Nautilus considered a nuisance. by ncm
Parent article: GNOME 2.30 has been released

I ask these things here, rather than offering patches, because I am under the impression that the Gnome project developers have been hostile to fixes in these areas,

Strange reasoning. I hope you don't believe random LWN.net people are better representatives of GNOME than people involved within GNOME.

Anyway, just provide a patch. Though likely just the method to disable Nautilus taking over your desktop changed (it isn't really something which is a standard configuration for GNOME devs, so breakage is more likely to happen).

FWIW, I help out GNOME (can push your patch).

(Log in to post comments)

Nautilus considered a nuisance.

Posted Apr 1, 2010 17:33 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

All it requires is just one Gconf change. A change from a '1' to a '0'. It works fine, Gnome works fine, Nautilus works fine... no breakage or anything like that. I use it all the time.

I don't understand what the big deal is really. If the objection is that you have to use gconf- editor or the command line version to make a configuration change and that is just too irritating or daunting, then the only fix would be to add a option to disable desktop ownership in Gnome's file-manager preferences dialog.

One of the lovely things about gsettings or whatnot is that you can make a change from any application and it won't interfer with Nautilus and the change is pretty much immediate.

That is you can make a 'tweak' program that is entirely seperate from Gnome's official stuff and it would work just fine.

There is a 'Gtweakui' program that does just that: GTweakUI

It's been last updated in 2004, but what is packaged by Debian still works just fine.

This is similar in concept to Microsoft's Tweak UI in their PowerToys
Weirdly the UI is not that surpisingly different from Gconf-editor:

Of course editing the Gconf registry stuff is safe were as editing the Windows registry manually is usually going to be disaster for most people.

------------------------------------------

In fact I think that 'Gnome PowerToys' would be a interesting tool for 'Power Users' to play around with.

Just a add-on not included with the default Gnome install or whatever, that contain odd UI changes that users can perform and play around with easily.

Stuff like swapping out Metacity for Gnome-shell/Compiz/OpenBox. Disabling/Enabling Nautilus browser mode, mucking around with multimedia buttons and whatever else oddball things people can think of.

It can be a 'for fun' thing that does not need to be HIG friendly or anything remotely like that.

Nautilus considered a nuisance.

Posted Apr 2, 2010 0:44 UTC (Fri) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]

FWIW, I help out GNOME (can push your patch).

Thank you. You may start by backing out the patch that wiped out the in-place gconf documentation for apps/desktop/interface/gtk_key_theme, which used to identify "Emacs" as one of the key theme options, with the meaningless filler "Basename of the default theme used by gtk+". See http://lwn.net/Articles/361486/ . Once this is done (and logged in #558198) we can begin to discuss other fixes.

Though likely just the method to disable Nautilus taking over your desktop changed (it isn't really something which is a standard configuration for GNOME devs, so breakage is more likely to happen).

As noted in the posting linked at the top, this dependency was deliberately added by somebody who apparently thought everyone should be forced to run Nautilus. Presumably many people find Nautilus useful, and don't mind running it. While Emacs is likewise useful to many people, it isn't forced on everyone.

Nautilus considered a nuisance.

Posted Apr 2, 2010 11:46 UTC (Fri) by Darkmere (subscriber, #53695) [Link]

I believe in the Nautilus case that it was decided upon that "Icons on the desktop" is a major feature for many people. And since Nautilus is the application that does this, it was embedded to default.

The idea to merge the device management into Nautilus was an interesting choice, but when Nautilus was the primary gio/g-vfs management tool, I guess it made sense from an ease of implementation point of view.

Note that this was also set to change again for 3.0, where it was decided that the desktop was no longer to be used much as such with gnome-shell, so it's likely that the device management be branched out into it's own daemon(again?).

But frankly, I see no good reason to make a shitstorm that you find "icons on the desktop" to be such a misfeature that you have to, gasp. Configure it to off.
(Don't forget to toggle off the "exit with last window" check too, for device management when you don't use Nautilus in desktop mode)

Also, if you look at the session settings, you can disable the panel completely via another one of those oh so horrid gconf settings. I'm sure you'll be pleased to hear. And since window decorations are such a nuisance for a purist lightist like yourself, why not disable the windowmanager as well while you're at it.

Frankly, in a metriocratic development, like any desktop system that actually aims for mass appeal, deciding that you do not want an integrated part of the "Desktop" metaphor is an outlier.