A Nautilus Sucks Donkeyballs Linux Rant

Paranoid Factoid@beehaw.org to Linux@lemmy.ml – 115 points –

Nautilus, the Gnome file assistant manager, sucks utter donkeyballs. Let us make an unordered list of the ways:

  • If the underlying filesystem changes, say a copy operation, the file manager view does not update without a manual refresh by CTL+R. This leaves the view in a stale state, presenting false file information to the user, who might never know until they do something bad. This is a showstopper bug that's been hanging around since forever.

  • Batch rename. Good luck trying to rename a series of files ordered sequentially by number, if the number happens to start with any number other than one. A sequence from 2 to x is impossible to batch rename. Because regex in sed never worked either. No, wait. It's always worked! For like, 50 years.

  • Why, when moving a collection of files or a directory within the same filesystem, does it actually perform a copy and delete operation, taking cpu and time, when the inode location could just be updated like mv does?

  • Thumbnails? Why do they take longer to generate for images and video than than the totality of the existence of the universe?

Nautilus is an unusable mess. If command line file utils were this bad, we'd never be able to reliably store and manipulate files. Who in their right mind actually uses this junk?

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Personally I never understood why file managers in linux refuse to do operations that require privileges. Guess what, if I have Nautilus open and want to move files into, let's say, /usr/local, I don't want to have to switch to the terminal to do so if I already have the stuff copied within nautilus. On Windows, I just get an admin password prompt if I try to do naughty stuff. On Linux, we have the whole polkit system, but no file manager seems to ever use it. Tbf, this is not a nautilus problem, as no file manager seems to do this.

You can do this in Nemo by default, and for Dolphin you'll need to install the KDE "kio-admin" package.

Oh wow you can? I just switched to Nemo on Arch after using Thunar for a long time but I got annoyed at it for crashing a lot when I copy files to my FTP server. Very good to know!

In Thunar it's just right-click and "Open as root"

I really like Thunar

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I'm aware of nautilus-admin, but not only is it not maintained, imho it should be part of nautilus by default, and it has to open a new nautilus window when you use it. What I want is to drag and drop files to /usr/local and then get a password prompt to do the move. With nautilus-admin, I need to have the foresight to use "Open as admin" when going into /usr/local, but if I had that foresight then I might as well just start nautilus as root to begin with. Usually I just want to look into the folder, and only then realize I need to change something, which means a good old "go back up one folder, then search the local folder again, then right click, search for 'Open as admin', then get thrown into a new window, completely disorienting myself in the process".

This annoys me to no end.

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