Mike Hicks

Advogato Entry 72

I tried Nautilus 1.0. I was actually fairly impressed. I had tried earlier versions of Nautilus and was not so happy. I think I really need to turn off the image scanning bit, since that's what really seems to slow it down and make it use tons of memory. I'm still not using it as my desktop, though.

Once Mozilla, Nautilus, and Evolution stabilize, my desktop is going to go through it's greatest transformation since I started using Gnome (way back around 0.13! ;-) Heck, it might even be the greatest change since I went from OS/2 to Linux.

A few things I noticed about Nautilus:

• The desktop icons do not move down to get out from under a panel at the top of the screen.
• There doesn't appear to be any way to configure the Mozilla component (I really don't like serif fonts when browsing, and I like to turn off underlined links).
• There doesn't appear to be any way to configure the text viewing widget (when viewing text, I like monospaced fontns)
• The background drawing system doesn't appear to work with programs like xplanet.
• I'd like a little more control over exactly how the files are sorted. For example, when viewing icons by Type, the ordering is pretty wacky. Nautilus appears to sort things by MIME type, but the types themselves don't appear to be sorted at all. It would be good to have something where media files are grouped, compressed files are grouped, documents are grouped, etc.
• Also, the windows don't seem to remember much information, like size.. I like it when a program remembers how big it's windows were from the last time (well, usually -- sometimes it just makes problems).
• For the Intermediate and/or Advanced users, it'd be great to have a button on the toolbar that would toggle the inclusion of dotfiles in the file listings
• If I'm going to use Nautilus to browse the web a lot, I really need something equivalent to Netscape's Personal Toolbar, where I can put my frequently used bookmarks

I also tried the latest Evolution snapshot. I was happy to see some GPG/PGP support. Unfortunately, the composer component seems to be broken, so I can read messages, but can't write them. I also don't know if there is GPG support for sending messages. I think the broken composer is just a configuration error on my system somewhere -- I just have to find it. Evolution still has problems, though it hasn't reached the fabled 1.0:

• It doesn't remember window sizes either.
• It took me forever to see that you configure the message viewer widget (GtkHTML?) through Gnome's Control Center, so there should be a link to that in Evolution's menus.
• Back when the composer did work, I don't think it could from .signatures that were named pipes.
• Evolution also displays my signature incorrectly, and I need to figure out why that is..

Mozilla is pretty good these days, but it isn't exactly a speed demon. In comparison, any version of Netscape is blazing fast. I guess the biggest problem is that Netscape seems to handle a heavily loaded system much better than Mozilla does. If you're compiling a kernel in the background, it feels icky (to me) to be running Mozilla instead of Netscape..

Anyway, I'm hoping to move away from Netscape as my main application. I'd like to use Mozilla as a browser or a widget (such as within Nautilus) and Evolution for mail/calendaring. I just wish Mozilla used Gtk+/Gnome widgets rather than those ugly XPWidgets (or whatever they're called). Then my desktop would finally look consistent..

Posted by mike at March 14, 2001 08:41 AM | Old Advogato Diary | TrackBack