File Manager Fussiness
Most of Gnome's warts--the really bad ones that just about any user will encounter--live in the file manager, Nautilus. This is a terrible shame, because Nautilus has quite a lot going for it, starting with its spatial browsing mode, which is unique in mainstream computing since the demise of Mac OS 9 ( for more on spatial file managers, see this classic Ars Technica article).
Other Nautilus pluses include its ability to thumbnail all sorts of files, and its play-on-hover functionality for audio files. Unfortunately, however, Nautilus is also one of the more neglected parts of Gnome.
The problems begin with the app's poor performance. Various open bugs in the Gnome bug tracker relate to how slowly Nautilus pops open new folder windows. I freely admit that I groan every single time I plug my 80GB Rockboxed iPod into one of my Linux machines, knowing that close to 30 seconds will pass before Nautilus is done thinking and can show me a list of what's on the device.
In other respects, Nautilus isn't slower than the competition, but is significantly less informative. Take, for example, the dialog box you see when a file-name conflict occurs. I recently tried to copy a Rockbox voice file to my iPod, which already had a file with the same name. Here's the dialog box Nautilus displayed:
This is friendly, yes, but not in the least bit helpful. Here's the Windows approach, on the other hand:
Windows seems to assume that giving me timestamp and file-size information will help me determine which version of the file I really want--and nine times out of ten, Windows is right. (Perhaps that's because nine times out of ten, I want the newer file?) Gnome doesn't give me such information, so I usually have to cancel the operation and go look at the two files in question myself. Windows gets this right. KDE copies the Windows approach. Mac OS X does not provide timestamp or file-size information, but at least tells me which file is newer, so that's a start. Gnome just annoys me whenever this issue arises.
Here's a similar (but even worse) problem that crops up frequently when I dump music to my iPod. See if you can tell what this dialog box is trying to say:
I know only from trial, error, experience, and memory that the 'Invalid parameters' error being tossed out here is more or less bogus. There are no parameters to begin with--all I've done to receive this dialog box is drop a folder with 10GB of music onto the icon for my iPod. What's going on is that somewhere in those 10 gigs of files is a file name containing a character that is legal under Linux but illegal under Windows. And since the iPod uses the Windows file system on its hard drive, Windows' file-name rules apply here.
Nautilus has recognized that a file has a bad character in it and cannot be copied, but you'll notice that the name of the file is obscured by ellipses in this display, ostensibly because the full path name is too long to fit in the dialog box. The problem is, there's no way to see the full path. So finding the offending file is a treasure hunt I get to engage in on my own. Maddening.
I mentioned Nautilus's wonderful thumbnail-generating abilities above, and they are great, but (sigh) it has a nasty bug: When you delete a file that has been thumbnailed, the stored thumbnail is not deleted. This can cause Nautilus's hidden thumbnail directory (where all those thumbnail images live) to grow out of control.
The solution is simple enough: Delete the .thumbnails folder in your home folder, or at least delete the older files in there and see what remains. (The worst that can happen is that you delete thumbnails for existing files, in which case Nautilus will regenerate them when it needs to. No worries.) But this issue was first noticed in 2004. Shouldn't we have a fix by now?
How about when something that used to work breaks? Shouldn't that merit a high-priority fix? It tends not to. Nautilus's drag-and-drop functionality was completely broken for well over a year before a fix arrived. But at least we got a fix there; at some point during the development of Gnome 2.18, users lost the ability, in certain circumstances, to drag files into a folder displayed in Nautilus's list view. (See the bug discussion for details.) This is another bug that bites me all the time when I'm moving music to and from my iPod. Still not fixed.
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