McCann: Cross Cut [the future of Nautilus]

Posted Aug 3, 2012 7:14 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: McCann: Cross Cut [the future of Nautilus] by tchernobog
Parent article: McCann: Cross Cut [the future of Nautilus]

I don't know if it is so fundamental. For instance, in Windows Explorer it's not enforced at all, and I think it's something like 10 years since I last used this feature. The default view is the icon one. The Mac OS X Finder uses a list mode, and you can browse one branch of the tree at a time.

You are looking in the wrong direction.

There are two audiences: developers and so-called end-users (content-consumers, mostly). For developers tree view is absolutely vital (compare IDEs of 20 years ago which had no tree view or very rudimentary tree view and today's IDEs which invariably put tree view of the project as the cornerstone of it's look and feel). For end users it's still not as important (both iOS and Android hide even the fact that you have some filesystem on your device from casual user).

Now, if GNOME removes such fundamental features then it's clear signal that it does not care about developers—but the problem here lies with the fact that there are no casual users on Linux: there are no games, no accounting programs, etc. The end result: system which is good for [almost] nobody. It clearly abandoned it's existing audience but it's built for an OS which makes it basically unusable for the Joe Average. The end result? Something bad for everybody. Either GNOME developers need to stop pretending they care about developers and start developing/embracing OS-for-the-content-consumers or they should return things like tree view which developer's value highly.