I’ve been using Ubuntu 11.04 in the corporate environment for over a year now and this post will attempt to summarise the frankly disappointing state of affairs that is “linux in the corporate environment”.

Thumnbnails

Such a little thing – getting a thumbnail for your images, videos or office documents.  In Windows, once a directory has been thumbnailed, it creates a hidden file “thumbs.db” in that directory, so that when other people visit the directory, there’s no need to recreate every thumbnail from scratch.

In Ubuntu, however, there is. Every user stores their own version of thumbnails .  At work, my .thumbnails directory is a little shy of 40Mb.  If you multiply that by 1000 employees, you’ve just wasted 39.96Gb of data creating the same set of thumbnails 1000 times.  Bandwidth, Disk I/O, wasted.  Worse, if you make your staff’s home directories a network share, you’re now wasting 40Gb of storage across your home share.

It’s a poor model and needs fixed.

Encrypted Home Directories with Likewise

Wanted an encrypted home directory?  Easy – tick the box when you install and you’ve got one.  But wait.  Logging with AD credentials after installing Likewise?  Nope.  Likewise creates a non-encrypted domain directory in your /home and every user that logs in thereafter gets an unencrypted home.

EDIT :

The use case is simply theft.  If a PC is stolen, then anything unencrypted on that device is going to be revealed trivially through the use of a USB boot key.  User documents, settings or, worse, Dropbox installs are going to be readable.  So I’d like to encrypt the home directories to prevent it.  It won’t be as effective as a full-disk LUKS install, but it integrates with login so that only one password is required, so a slicker option in my opinion.

If anyone knows a way around this behavior, please holler.

Passwords

In Windows, every password you enter on the system is shown on screen by substituting asterisks.  On Ubuntu, the same is true, but many of these entries have a tick box that says “Show password”.  What the hell?  Why?  Why on earth, having entered my password would I EVER want it shown on screen??

Basically what this means is that even a 2 minute slip up where you forget to lock your screen while you grab a packet of crisps or a coffee – you’ve possibly just let a colleague see what your password is.  I raised with the Seahorse devs, but they argued that if you leave your laptop/PC unlocked for two minutes then it’s compromised irretrievably and refused to acknowledge that the “show password” option was making things worse.

What can you do, maliciously, in two minutes with a Windows laptop?  Plenty, but I think it would be mostly obvious.  I reckon it would be quite challenging to seriously compromise a user without his knowledge on a Windows computer.  On Ubuntu – 20 seconds to reveal my WIFI password, which also happens to be my AD password, since we use PEAP authentication.

“Linux is more secure.”  Really?  Depends, doesn’t it?

EDIT:

I should clarify my use case here.  We have contractors coming onsite all the time to help with new product install, support cases, or training.  Due to the nature of my job, a lot of what we access is protected by either firewall or ACL, so that only specific devices can access the service that contractor is onsite for.

I trust these guys not be installing root kits or maliciously hacking my laptop while I grab us both a coffee, but in the case of Ubuntu, I literally can’t use it because while I do trust them generally, it’s just too easy for them to stumble upon a password box with a glaringly tempting “show password” button next to it.

The weird thing when I raise the “show password” issue is that no-one can give me a use-case for its existence.  Or if you count “I forgot my password” as a use case, then they can’t explain the huge inconsistencies in Ubuntu – I can “show” my keychain password and my WIFI password but for some strange reason, I can’t show the password for my actual install, or my encryption password.  Why?  If physical access = “toast”, then why do I have to enter my previous password to change it to a new one?  Why am I prompted for my password on login?  Why am I prompted for my password on resume?

Rhetorical questions obviously, but despite everyone seeing that passwords for logging in, decrypting and resuming are necessary, they lose all logic about a simple “show password” box.  IT IS NOT NECESSARY.

I just don’t understand it.  It’s like a blindness.

Proxy support

Very frustrating.  The command line uses one environment variable, while GUI programs use another.  The proxy configuration dialogue has an option to “Apply System-Wide”, but doesn’t appear to do anything.  Bypass options don’t always work, or require a reboot to activate.  Some downloads (flash-plugin for example) will use wget in the middle of the apt-get install, which fails, because apt-get doesn’t pass in the proxy option.

Worse, why isn’t there an option to set the proxy by network?  If I’m on our internet-only WIFI, I don’t want a proxy, but if I’m on our internal-WIFI, I do.  Why can’t it set/unset the proxy depending on what I connect to?

Mapping Drives

In Windows, you map a drive, then there’s an option to “Reconnect at next login”.  Not in Ubuntu.  Or any linux distro I’ve tried in fact.  No, you have to edit your /etc/fstab for this functionality.  It’s 2012 and you have to edit text files to make samba shares persistent.

Evernote

Finally, a non-O/S specific issue.  In fact, it’s a bit unfair to include this, because it’s not really Ubuntu’s fault… but it’s a big one for me, so :  Evernote, which I use every hour of every day, doesn’t have an Ubuntu version.  Some utter genius has coded the awesome “NixNote” in java and so I use that.  But pretty frustrating that such a crucial tool (for me) doesn’t have a native client.  And launching java to run NixNote is a drain – it takes about 30 seconds to start up and synchronisation isn’t quite as slick as the native version.

Summary

It’s not all bad.  Nautilus remains much better to use than Explorer, LibreOffice is getting better all the time, workspace shifting is a joy, start up is very quick and Xenapp covers the few programs I use that don’t have an Ubuntu version – Vsphere, I’m looking at you.

What else?  Network Manager makes setting up multiple networks a joy (overlooking, for the moment, the proxy issues above), external monitor support works well, and of course terminal access with built-in python is superb.

But there’s so much wrong with Ubuntu in the corporate that it takes real determination to make it work, and many of the issues just shouldn’t exist in this day and age.  Maybe 12.04, the Precise Pangolin will deliver a better experience, but nothing I’ve seen so far suggests that this will be the case.  In fact, in many areas, I think there will be regressions due to the move to Gnome 3 – such as external monitor support.

Time will tell, but I’m not holding my breath for the perfect corporate system.

It was September last year when I last properly tried Chromium in Ubuntu.  Back then, there was no bookmark sync, extensions were a glint in the dev’s eyes and GTK theme support was a new feature.

I didn’t particularly elaborate in that article about why I didn’t make the switch back then.  In fact, I open the article claiming that the experience was a mixed bag, then pretty much rave about it!  I must have been tired that day…

Then

The primary reason I didn’t switch was that I was hooked on Firefox extensions.  Well, four anyway – SyncPlaces, Flashblock, AdBlock and FEBE.

• Syncplaces will sync bookmarks using any FTP, NFS or Samba share.
• Flackblock does what it says on the tin – it replaces Flash elements on a web page with a click-able placeholder.
• AdBlock Plus needs no introduction.  As far as I know, the best advert blocker for any browser.   Go on, prove me wrong!
• FEBE is a backup and restore tool.

Now

Flash forward, 9 months later : present day.  3 of these extensions now exist on Chromium, kind of.  Here they are :

• Chromium Sync.  Technically, not an extension : this is now built into Chromium itself and all you need is a Google account.  Your bookmarks, extensions, preferences, auto fill and themes can be synced across any PC you use Chromium.  Syncplaces was, by comparison, pretty horrific to set up (and needed to be downloaded first), but it did mitigate any privacy concerns you might have about uploading your data to Google.  Personally, I use so many Google products day to day that uploading my bookmarks wasn’t a concern.  Your mileage may vary.

Chromium Sync Option

Sync Options

• Flashblock for Chromium shares its name with its Firefox compatriot, but they’re by different authors.  There may be trouble ahead!
• Similar story for AdBlock for Chromium.  Well, at least it’s not called “Adblock Plus”!  This has similar functionality to its Firefox big brother, allowing multiple subscriptions to keep the adblock relevant, and it can also be turned on/off for specific sites.  It does not, however, sport the incredible per-element blocking that made the original so powerful.

AdBlock options

So, what’s missing?  Well, FEBE, obviously.  I still can’t find an extension which will “snapshot” my Chromium install and perfectly restore it on another machine.  My Firefox browsing history goes back about 2 years, across 4 different operating systems thanks to FEBE.  However, given that Chromium Sync started off as just Bookmarks before expanding into Themes, and just recently Extensions, I suspect that it’s only a matter of time before we see History too.

Google Sync puts all your data into a special directory on Google Docs, so I imagine that anything (within reason) could be stored there in future.

Google Docs

We Fear Change

So did I make the switch?  Incredibly, given my history and love of Firefox : “Yep”.  In February, I bought my Google Nexus One phone and on that day, I suspect that I may just have sold my soul to Google.  In April, Froyo fever started pitching and in preparation, I started dabbling with Chromium again.  Finally, after May’s Google I/O conference when Froyo was announced, one feature in particular swayed me towards moving to Chromium whole scale – the cloud sync feature.  This is where you buy music on Amazon (or Google themselves this Christmas, perhaps) and you simply send your purchase to your phone, right from within the web page.  Or perhaps you’re on Google Maps getting directions, and those directions are sent as Navigate options to your phone.  Very sweet.  But initially at least, I think it requires Chromium.

Pros

• Start up hasn’t changed in 9 months – it’s still blindingly fast.
• The Javascript engine is famously fast and sites like this will prove that very effectively.  Perhaps Firefox 4 will close the gap here though.
• Extensions install instantly.  They un-install just as fast.  Their options pages are web pages, which makes for a very integrated, natural feeling.
• Chomium Sync, despite being Google-only, will rock your world if you use Chromium on more than one PC.
• The “Awesome Bar” doubles as a URL entry location and a search bar in one.  I think this used to be offered in Firefox, then reverted.  The latest rumours I’ve heard suggest that it’s heading back to one-bar for Firefox 4.
• Did I mention that start up?

Cons

• In order to take advantage of the speed of development, I’m using the daily build PPA (details below).  This means two things.  One, you’ll be prompted to update every day by your package manager.  Two, many banking websites won’t entertain you.  Here in the UK, I have one account at the RBS and they block beta builds.  Interesting actually – even a user-agent switcher doesn’t fool their website, so they must be fingerprinting another way somehow.
• In the short term, a few things will have moved around and will take getting used to.  Nothing major, but here’s an example : right clicking on a link in Firefox, “Open in New Tab” is the third option down, but in Chromium it’s the top option.  There’s a few little gotchas like this.
• Bookmark organisation isn’t quite as slick as Firefox yet.  You can’t grab tabs and create shortcuts from them – you must still use the favicon logo to the left of the URL.  If, like me, you keep multiple folders on the toolbar, you’ll find that you  can’t re-order the bookmarks inside these folder using drag-and-drop.  You have to right-click, open the organiser and do it there.  Finally, I’m not convinced by “Other Bookmarks”.  It gets cluttered very quickly and takes up valuable toolbar space if you don’t use it.
• Downloads are pretty intrusive, with a big bar appearing at the bottom of the browser whenever anything comes down the line.  You have to manually close it after each download.  I couldn’t find a way, extension or otherwise, of changing this.

Install

I use the daily builds (https://launchpad.net/~chromium-daily/+archive/ppa), so in order to install, just pop these commands into a terminal

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:chromium-daily/ppa

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install chromium-browser

After a bit of research, spurred on by this OMG Ubuntu! article, I bit the bullet and installed Blogilo. Before doing so, I tried BloGTK and Gnome Blog. The former had potential, but no WYSIWYG editor, so you had to know your HTML. I don’t. The latter was incredibly basic and doesn’t even download previous entries for reference or editing. It’s more like a micro-blogging client.

So, KDElibs installed, Blogilo installed and… nothing. I ran it in a terminal, and got some horrific output. It took a bit of Googling, but eventually, I found this post, whose comments reveal that LibQT4-SQL-SQLite must be installed. Total mystery why this isn’t a dependency. Everything else required certainly was.

Blogilo

So, first impressions then? I’m typing this in Blogilo now after a simple “Add Blog” wizard downloaded my meagre previous entries. I tried to make a small edit to one of those, but discovered that although the entry came down and was editable, it didn’t know what tags were applied to the post. I duly ticked the relevant tags and hit the “submit” button. The progress started… and never stopped. But it did, it seems, upload. It put my first paragraph into a bullet list, somewhat unexpectedley, but otherwise it’s fine.

But then some more serious issues arise. I’ve just tried uploading a screenshot of Blogilo in action (after using the awesome Shutter to grab the window). While gnome apps generally let me copy/paste the image from Shutter into the relevant window, in Blogilo the “paste” option remains resolutely greyed out. Perhaps some missing KDE libs, or just a total lack of communication between gnome and KDE. I’m not sure.

Worse, when I manually add the image using the add image button, it will only add at full size. If I add it at say 640×480, I generate a KIO slave error. More missing KDE dependencies, perhaps.

Finally, perhaps I’m missing it, but there’s no “Check Spelling” button. There is, however, an option to enable spell checking as you type, which I generally dislike as it generates flashing red underlines for every word as you type until it recognises what you’re actually doing. It also highlights all the stuff in the post you don’t care about because they’re product names.

I’m not giving up on Blogilo, but I doubt I’ll use it much. Perhaps if media uploading worked, I could forgive the various other quirks, but for the moment, it remains easier to type directly into the web interface of WordPress, at least for me.

Just a quick list of top-quality Ubuntu software that you may or may not have heard about.  In no particular order.  Many are installable from the repository, while others might require a little google/search for their PPA (I’ve kicked you off with a link for each).  This post revolves around Ubuntu 10.04 – the Lucid Lynx.

1. Handbrake.  This allows you to rip your DVDs into MP4 format for viewing on any H264 compatible device, such as Sony PSP or Android phone.  The interface is very slick and easy and it will take advantage of multiple cores to speed up the process.

2.  Remmina.  This is an RDP and VNC client.  You can use it to connect to Windows terminal services (RDP) or Ubuntu (VNC) remote desktops.  It also supports Avahi which is like a local-network autodiscovery of these services.  It can also use SSH if required.  What really makes this stand out though is the beautiful interface for launching these sessions.

3. Deluge.  A superb alternative to Transmission, this superlative client can also run in a client/server mode which is supremely easy to set up.  Simply run Deluge on the server in “server” mode, then run the same package on your laptop in “client” mode, connecting to the server.  Thereafter, anything you kick off on your laptop will actually start downloading on your server.  Close your laptop and everything just keeps ticking over on your server.  Superb functionality and beautifully realised.

4. jBrout.  If you have a lot of photos and struggle to categorise them, this is the software for you.  The idea is that you create tags for your collection (people, place names, things, etc) and then you drag those tags onto the pictures.  What stands this software out from the rest is that while many other programs will then create a database to store these tags in (which you’ll lose if you re-install, sit at another PC and so on), jBrout will actually edit the photo, adding the tags into the Exif details of that photo.   Never lose your hard work again!  I’ve written more about jBrout in an earlier post.

5. Phatch.  The title is meant to be an amalgam of “Photo” and “Batch”.  Another cracking interface makes it very easy to take a folder (or multiple folders) full of pictures and apply various transformations to them.  The main use I found for this is to take ALL your photos and rename them into a folder structure which is dictated by the time you took the photo.  This way, you can see, visually, when each photo was taken.  Combined with jBrout, you’ll never struggle to find another photo again.

All the time, I hear people claiming that the first thing they do with a stock Ubuntu build is turn off “useless” Compiz.  Now, I don’t mind that they’re turning it off – it’s their computer.  But if these people are truly claiming that Compiz is useless and adds nothing, then they’re extremely ignorant of its features.

A lot of early focus surrounding Compiz was on the now famous (infamous?) “Cube” plug-in.  Media coverage then honed into the truly “useless” features, such as burning up closed windows, “raining” on the desktop and painting fire on the screen.  Not only does this do an injustice to the various extremely useful Compiz plug-ins, but I don’t recall any such furore surrounding the Macs introduction of such desktop effects, such as the Genie minimise effect.

Some of these effects are incredibly useful to people with disabilities, such as snapping windows or zooming the desktop.  There are too many to feature in one article without boring the audience, but here’s a few choice plug-ins that I use daily and truly enhance the Ubuntu desktop experience.  I used RecordMyDesktop to upload simple example videos to Youtube.

The Zoom Plug-In

My eyesight isn’t perfect, but it’s not bad.  And I still need to enlarge the text of certain websites, or very simply lean closer to the monitor.  At least, I did until I discovered this incredible plug-in which must surely rank amongst the most useful accessibility aid that no one knows about!

You hold down your Super key (windows or mac key, usually) and then scroll-wheel up/down to zoom in/out.  It’s smooth, intuitive and best of all, you retain complete control over the mouse and keyboard, allowing you to interfact fully with the zoomed in section of screen.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jiAmlQbC8Y

The Scale Plug-In

Obviously inspired by the Mac’s “Expose” function, the Scale add-in lets you hit a key combination to instantly view a scaled version of every open window.  Then you just mouse-over the one you want and up it comes.  As with all Compiz effects, it’s slick and it makes window management extremely intuitive.  In fact, it’s replaced Alt-TAB as my usual method of window management.  I do have one gripe with Scale – it won’t show minimised windows (unlike its KDE counterpart).  At all.  There’s no option to change this, so if you like to minimise your windows then I’m afraid Scale might not be for you.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHesPRMTTSg

The “Cube” Plug-In

Yes, it’s been overdone on Youtube and elsewhere, and yes, it’s slightly gimicky and even yes, it’s not strictly required, given that you can still swap workspaces very efficiently without all those flashy, spinny cubes.  However, in terms of visualisation, nothing can beat the Cube.  Drag a window to the edge of your screen and the cube rotates to the next workspace, gradually at first to prevent error, then finally snapping into place when you keep dragging.  Again, it’s intuitive, and it’s visually stunning, which is probably why it got the most attention when Compiz first launched all those years ago (three?)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kZWWM3CIqk

So the next time you consider disabling desktop effects in Ubuntu, spare a wee thought for my favourite plug-ins and consider giving them a chance to shine.

I’ve been properly trying out Chromium (currently 4.0.204.0) on my Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) laptop. It’s been a mixed bag. Here’s some pros:

1. Incredible start up.  Really, incredible.  Click icon, start using app IMMEDIATELY.  I’m really not used to that.  Chromium will have started up in half the time it takes Firefox 3.5 to load the SECOND time on Jaunty.
2. Feels very snappy.  It seems to display as much of the page as it can before it’s got the whole lot, which helps the feeling of speed.
3. Supports your GTK theme, so it fits nicely into the overall feel of the desktop, particularly if you add (as I do) the standard menu button.
4. Chromium Experiments are a lot of fun and really showcase the difference in speed in the V8 javascript engine.
5. The speed dial that appears when you ask for a new tab is pretty sweet.  A lot like Opera, I think, although it’s been a while since I tried that.
6. The resizing is very quick, although the increments seem to be quite large.  CTRL-mousewheel is a nice standard shortcut.

Forget Vinagre, forget Terminal Services Client, because there’s one tool now available that combines the best of both into one : GRDC. It’s a gnome tool that allows you to create a series of VNC and RDP entries (shortcuts if you like) and then launch them with a double-click. I’ve nominated it for sysadmin tool of the year in Sourceforge’s community awards for 2009. Please support its author with a click.

Been a while since I’ve posted, hasn’t it? But that just means that there’s even more cool stuff to nail now that I’m back. To kick off, here’s a video showing the latest and greatest from Fluendo’s Elisa media centre.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_Hkr5GyrA0

Having watched all that, I do have to admit that Elisa is still a little ropey on my Hardy build. I’m hopeful that by the time the Heron goes live, we’ll have an Elisa that runs comfortably under Compiz and doesn’t need too much tweaking of the configuration file. In fact, the drag and drop support for video/picture sources is a great start in that endevour. Finger’s crossed for April.

Yep, okay, I admit it – this was originally called “11 Things I Hate About Nautilus”. But when I think about it a little longer, so that the adrenaline fueled red-mist dies down a little, I don’t actually hate Nautilus. In fact, I really, really like it. It’s because I like it so much that the little (and not so little) things in this list fill me with so much teeth grinding frustration. It could be almost PERFECT! It’s soooo close!

But I’m a perfectionist – if I ever got involved with developing software (those days are decades ago now), I’d never actually release anything. It would be in private BETA for years on end while I find yet another little way to make it better.

So. Technical details, in case I never update this article. I’m using the Nautilus on Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn), which runs Gnome 2.18.1.

1. Multi-file permission changes are possible, but not multi-file ownership changes. Eh? But you heard me right. Select a bunch of files, and choose properties – you can change the permissions, but NOT the owner, or group ownership attributes. Ah well, time to learn some command line, I suppose. Luckily, chown isn’t a great difficulty to master, but it niggles: if they’ve incorporated the chmod command into Nautilus, why the hell is chown not in there?
2. In Edit/Preferences/Icon View Defaults, the default size of icons affects the desktop icons. Why? Why on earth would someone want their desktop icons to change when all they’re doing is changing the default size of icons in new folders? Why? Seriously, at the risk of sounding like a broken record… WHY?
3. Thumbnails are either on, off, or “on for local only” and this is system-wide… you can’t exclude certain folders explicity (like .thumbnails).
4. Listing columns is fully dependant on the few ticks boxes you specify in the preferences. There’s no options to show bitrate, exif, or document information – even though all this data is present if you right click on the file and choose the audio/video tab (for movies for example). Oh, and I’ll sneak in a “4.5″ : you have to enter the edit/preferences/list columns view to change these – for some reason I can’t just right click on the columns and choose, say “customise”, like in every other operating system in existence!
5. Movie preview tries to preview, while the movie is still downloading from the camera. This is a waste, since it just chews up your CPU while the thumbnailer reads the file mid-copy and shows you a preview… then again… and again. Presumably this is also slowing down the copy. This ties into number 3, where I’d like my per-folder thumbnail views – I tend to dump my files into a central area before copying them into the right folders afterwards.
6. Changing the icon of an item presents a file chooser with a file-by-file preview, instead of a thumbnail view of the folder. Which, of course, means that it’s unbelievably tedious to find any decent icons. I ended up downloading a bunch of free clipart and browsing to the file, whose name I already knew because I’d browsed to it in another windows and used thumbnail view to see the icon. Which is a waste of effort really. The lengths we go to for really nice desktop icons, eh?
7. You can’t rename USB attached drives, even though it looks like you can. Shame – the Mac can do this seamlessly. You just “Get Info” on the drive and type the new name. I think there’s a wee tool out there called USB-Label or something like that. I’ll research it and add it here.
   • Update: This is disappointing – you need different command line tools depending on the filesystem. And yep, you heard right – they’re command line tools. As in, plug-in your drive so that it appears, then open a terminal and type (if it’s FAT based) mtools /dev/sdx ::LabelHere. Or use the e2label command if it’s an EXT based filesystem (there’s another tool for NTFS, but of course, I wouldn’t advise modifying NTFS drives in Ubuntu anyway). Of course, most people won’t know which to use, won’t know what the /dev/ point is for their drive and certainly won’t research it enough to care about using command line tools anyway. At least it’s possible though – so point 7 still stands.
8. Nautilus doesn’t appear to remember your preference for showing address-bar icons or address-bar text. It seems to default back to address-bar buttons all the time. Oh, and number 8.5 would have to be: you can’t drag and drop files onto the buttons in the address-bar.
9. Want to search for something in a folder? No worries – hit the search button and type it in. Found it? Good. Want to show that folder’s contents again now that you’ve found it? Tough luck, buddy, you can’t. Try hitting the search button again, and you just clear the current search and you’re still there, with your search results still staring at you. It sounds trivial, I suppose, but the only way you can view that folder normally again, that I’ve found, is to click on another folder, then click back to your first folder again.
10. When you mount a drive via smb:// mime-types appear to go out of the window. To explain by example, if I mount a drive to a Windows or Mac volume in nautilus,either by using Places/”Connect to Server”, or just typing in an smb:// URL, then if I double click on a movie file to play it, Totem complains that the file can’t be played over smb://. However, if I use my windows laptop to that same Mac share, or use my Mac to a share on my Ubuntu box, they’ll play the videos quite happily.
    • Update: If you install SMBtools via Synaptic, you can write a one line script which mounts the drives in question under your media directory, perhaps in /media/network/server1 for example.  Then, nautilus is quite happy to play the files because it sees them as “local” to your file system.  It’s a shame that a kludge like this is needed though.
    • FuseSMB is another take on the same idea, except that you don’t specify the individual shares, but instead just the server name and (I think) Fuse creates a media/network/server1 share automatically with every available share for that server as a subfolder.  Quite a nice way of doing it, but you still need that one line script and that script will have to be added /etc/rc.local if you want it to run everytime you start your PC.
11. When the right-hand pane is full of file in list mode, there’s no way to right click and choose “New Folder”. Why? Because there’s no white-space. I suppose that there’s a gnome developer out there somewhere is sleeping, snuggled up to their copy of the HIG, content in the knowledge that they’ve created uniformity across the gnome gui. Insane reasoning of course, but then these are the guys whocreated a screensaver for their desktop that doesn’t allow you to make basic customisations to the screensavers in question. Did you open that link just there? How can you argue with a guy who sees the world like that??? How can you say, “Listen man, I just want more flying toast on my desktop”. You can’t. You just can’t, because they’re “taking a new approach”, “haven’t heard any compelling arguments against it” and yet still “keeping an open mind”. Sheesh.

So that’s it. Nautilus – so nearly perfect. And yet…

C’mon gnome developers. You live in a bizarre, eccentric, elitist bubble of a planet and in so many ways resemble the Apple crew (and not in a good way sometimes – dumb this desktop down any further and we’re gonna start calling it “My First Dekstop” for ages 3 up), but when you hit the high notes, you guys rock. Roll on gnome 2.19 and 2.20!

I’ve got to say, I’ve spent a bit of time on YouTube after writing this, and KDE4 looks very, VERY nice indeed. If they get rid of the multiple, useless menus, and make Konqueror something more usable as a file browser (like Nautilus), I could be making the jump. Time will tell.

Edit : I’ll get round to researching these bugs on bugzilla and provide the references where applicable. If they’re not there, I’ll create entries for them and note them here in this article. I’m nice that way (not really, but I do have a conscience).