Nautilus dogginess

["Daniel Hauck" <xdesign hotmail com>]

Okay, someone asked me to give Nautilus 1.02  a chance before bashing.  I've
given it a chance.

Firstly, I discovered the dependency problem the put a brake on installing.
It seems that there was a libgtop-examples RPM installed that was dependant
on a prior version.  The Ximian packages aren't offering a similar package
to upgrade the examples RPM and so the dependency couldn't be resolved.  I
resolved it manually by removing the libgtop-examples RPM from my system and
all installed well.

I have Nautilus is all its sluggish glory installed.  It's SLOW.  It's not
Nautilus's fault though... it seems someone made the decision to use Mozilla
instead of GTKhtml.  If I'm not mistaken, GTKhtml is faster if more
simplistic than Mozilla.  Mozilla simply is and always has been a slow dog.
Netscape 6 was based on Mozilla and it went over like a lead balloon.

What makes the Nautilus team think that Nautilus based on Mozilla will go
over any better than Netscape based on Mozilla?

Again, I must reinforce that it cannot be a performance problem with my
machine as it's loaded with very nice stuff under the hood.  That said, I
must say I still prefer to use and will continue to use GMC for my file
browsing.  It's simply faster and it works.

Okay, so Nautilus wins the beauty contest hands-down.  But this isn't a
beauty contest.  It's an operating environment...a place where operations
are carried out.  If I have to pause for each directory to be loaded and
rendered, that's silly.

One other issue I have with Nautilus that might help make up for its speed
shortcomings -- there is no way to set the default view that I can detect.
It always defaults to having the large icons and all that stuff.  I prefer
the list/detailed view of files but I must select that for every directory I
browse.  What an annoyance!  And I have turned off every speed-draining
option I could find.

Sorry for being so mean about this I really didn't mean to be but it's kind
of disappointing after all the wait+hype.  I'm still rooting for the Gnome
camp because I like the style.  But those KDE folks are gaining ground in a
very "sturdy" kind of way... it's reminiscent of the Volkswagen development.
The earliest models were very ugly cars but they were reliable and they ran
forever.  Now there are Porsche's and Audi's out there that are both looking
nice and performing well and it's pretty much all based on the principles
set out by Volkswagen.

So what do you think?  Give up on so much of the glitz and glamour and focus
more on operational performance?  Many people have given up on using
enlightenment as their Window manager of choice because of performance
issues.  I think it warrants some attention here.

I've said more than my piece here... thanks for reading.



Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature. - Helen
Keller
UNIX *is* user-friendly; it's just picky about its friends.