Re: [Nautilus-list] performance and usability

[John Fleck <jfleck inkstain net>]

On Fri, Jan 25, 2002 at 10:03:17AM +0100, Christian Rose wrote:
> fre 2002-01-25 klockan 07.42 skrev James Mitchell Allmond:
> > I hate to be negative but Nautilus is very unusable from a user point of
> > view. Even though today's file browsers have to have all the bells and
> > whistles, it should not be at the expense of performance. As of now
> > nautilus performs so god awful in terms of general speed and
> > responsiveness, that's it's unusable and unacceptable as a day to day
> > file browser.
> [...]
> 
> Hi James.
> 
> If you had read the archives of this list, you'd know that performerance
> is one of the areas where the GNOME 2.0 version of Nautilus is
> significantly improved (See Seth's recent mail). So GNOME 2.0 should
> bring you a better performerance experience in this regard.
> 
> Also, while I think a lot of your criticism is valid, I find the general
> negative tone in the mail to be quite disappointing. Nautilus is a
> volunteer project and most of the (relatively few) developers are not
> paid to be working on Nautilus. If you want some feature that you think
> is missing, the best way is to contribute a patch. I'm sure your
> contributions are welcome.
> 
> 

James -

Thanks for your comments.

They would be more helpful if you would be more specific. Timing
tests, the version of Nautilus you're running, and especially features
you think should be removed to streamline its operation. One of the
difficulties the Nautilus developers have faced is the tug-of-war
between various ideas about what functions a "file manager" should
perform. Bugzilla and the lists are littered with requests for "the
one function it is obvious a file manager really needs". You may have
the idea in your mind of the perfect file manager which is quick and
does just the set of operations you need, but my experience in
observing Nautilus over the last year or two is that many people have
very different ideas about what set of functions that implies.

Cheers,

John