Nautilus user feedback

[Calum Benson <calum benson sun com>]

Some random Nautilus feedback from a Sun beta customer using Nautilus
2.0.7, thought some of you might be interested...

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Nautilus comes up with an error on my home directory 'Sorry, couldn't
display all the contents of "<username>"' - why not, earlier versions
didn't complain. (And it really has failed - sometimes it only shows
half a dozen files.) I've got a reasonable number of files, but many of
my users have more. This happens on a lot of directories, actually, and
I seem to get an error that may be related:

** (nautilus:12916): WARNING **: Hit unhandled case 9 (Bad file handle)
in fm_report_error_loading_directory

nautilus (still) thinks Adobe Fontlist files are postscript documents,
so mistakenly tries to throw them at gv which fails.

nautilus can't handle jar or tar.gz files.

I looked at a simple text file with nautilus and it failed to handle
it. It generates an error 'The Text view encountered an error and can't
continue. You can choose another view or go to a different location.'
It started to display it, and then went blank. I get an error:

DKIOCINFO failed : Invalid argument

** (nautilus:12916): WARNING **: A view failed. The UI will handle this
with a dialog but this should be debugged.

Nautilus shows a double dash ("--") underneath a directory. It should
display nothing or something useful.

Nautilus (and eye of gnome) still give me a pink checkerboard when
displaying tiff files.

After a little while, nautilus stopped responding to mouse clicks at
all. Completely. I can't even close it. (It looks as though this is a
stupid UI problem - there were hidden popup windows. For example: if
you select a file and then move it slightly, a popup appears (asking if
you want to change to manual layout). However, if you then let go of
the icon, and click again, nautilus pops to the front, obscuring the
popup, and the window goes dead. This happened to me on occasion
without even seeing the popup flash up at all, and I've managed to get
into this state several timnes now inside half an hour of using it. Our
users are really going to hate this behaviour.

Nautilus has a pretty stupid idea about file typing. For example, it
thinks README.it (the Italian readme) on the redhat CD is a music
file. At least, that's what the icon looks like. There are two
problems, really (1) it's getting the type wrong, and (2) the typing
isn't tied in to the available applications. CDE is WAY BETTER than
gnome here.

Essentially, nautilus seems thoroughly broken and is pretty well
unuseable.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            GNOME Desktop Group
http://ie.sun.com                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems