Nautilus 3.6 Sucks

Wow, I was a little shocked to see the latest release of Nautilus! I now understand why people are calling it a catastrophe. The first thing that I noticed was the mess it made of my folders by not sorting directories first. This was easily fixed through dconf-editor (and probably correctable through the nearly hidden preferences menu entry). Then I found that list view is missing expandable folders. Tree view is gone. Split pane is gone. Compact view gone. Go menu gone. Computer gone from Places. File "accessed" column gone. It was really just cut to pieces, and is no longer useful for me. The arguments for these drastic changes are pretty weak: you can read through them here and here. This hearkens back to the mess Gnome made of GDM by cutting features, and other weird usability decisions of days gone by (remember when the default Nautilus behavior of opening every folder in a new window was popular?) Smaller is not always better, and less is not more. Sure feature creep is something to look out for (Emacs need not be repeated), but the reason I and many others have been attracted to Linux for so long is the customizability. If you want to be minimal you can, and if you want music playing on your X greeter login screens while xscreensaver runs in the root window -- so be it! It isn't a plus to restrict your user experience, and remove the capability for users to change their workspace to fit their needs.This debate is really about who your users are (high-tech end users), versus who you want your users to be (people with tablets.) You can't cut off your current user base chasing a market that doesn't exist yet.

So I played with a lot of other file managers tonight, and I found a nice clean replacement. It's called Nemo (after the captain of the Nautilus). It seems like a decent fork made by sane people, and I recommend it if you are simply fed up with Nautilus 3.6. Install and enjoy:

$ sudo yum install nemo