Fwd: [Unity-design] What do we do with the file manager?

Georgi Karavasilev motorslav at gmail.com
Thu Aug 9 12:11:16 UTC 2012


>
> Nautilus 3.4 is the safest bet out there (feature and stability wise),
> however it has that horrid chopped down right sided toolbar and the back
> and forward on the right and neither of those two are even remotely good
> looking.
>
> *It would be easy enough to tweak it, but staying on an old unmaintained
> version of nautilus is not a solution going forward.*
>

Exactly what I think about staying on 3.4.

Nautilus 3.6 is pretty, however it is terrible chopped down feature wise
> and doesn't fit Ubuntu and Unity at all (super-menu and no menubar, hence
> no appmenu => no HUD, light toolbar (and all other apps have dark ones).
>
> *We could probably hack around and push the popup menu content to the HUD
> if that's the only issue, the problem is that it's not the only change so
> far (the drop of the menu means we have no "desktop menu" on empty desktops
> at the moment, they dropped compact view, treeview sidepanel, the lack of
> menubar looks weird in unity, etc)*
>

Again, bang on the money. Whilst nautilus 3.6 works for Gnome it just can't
quite cut it for Unity.

Nemo is the new kid on the block and that's pretty much all that's known
> about it.
>
> *it's basically a fork of nautilus 3.4 no?*
>

Yes, Nemo is Nautilus 3.4 fork from the Mint guys. However Mint and Ubuntu
have very different design ideas and in mind, hence I think that Nemo is
not the solution here.

Marlin is the prettiest file manager there is out there, however it does
> lack stability (and maybe a features - MAYBE) and *needs **a lot*
>  manpower.
>
>
> *The elementary guys worked on top of marlin for this own file manager as
> well:
> https://launchpad.net/pantheon-files*
>

Yeah, there is also Pantheon-Files, but knowing the elementary guys Marlin
will be much more open for contributions and ubuntui-zing. Elementary and
Ubuntu have two different HIGs and there will be design issues poping out
with Pantheon files. This one is a prime example:
Unity needs menubar => appmenu => HUD. Elementary apps depend on cog-menu
button on the right, hence they are likely to not allow pantheon-files to
have a menubar, even if it is optional.
Marlin dev on the other hand (am-monkeyd) should be more open to Ubuntu
contributions to Marlin, through I can't guarantee that 100%.

The reason why I started this talk is because there file manager issue is
becoming more and more problematic as the time goes by and a decision must
be taken sooner or later :) ... preferably sooner :P
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