Nautilus problems

[Lynn David Newton]

  Craig> Well up till recently I was using Gnome. With
  Craig> a upgrade to slack 8 I notice that Gnome added
  Craig> this nautilus file manager. I can't get that
  Craig> thing to run stable. Nautilus keeps crashing X
  Craig> when I try to check my html dir (which is
  Craig> rather large). It also has the same problem
  Craig> when handling a small number of large files it
  Craig> seems. I switched back over to KDE while I try
  Craig> to figure this out but the newer KDE layout is
  Craig> quite nice. Has anyone else had problems with
  Craig> Nautilus?

No. (So why am I bothering to respond?)

Nautilus is pretty nice for what it is. But so is
Konqueror, what I've seen of it.

The only reason I've dealt with Nautilus at all is
because I'm writing some fundamental Linux-oriented
Unix courseware in my present work and last week I had
to write a whole section of a chapter describing it and
how to use it, so I had to take a crash course in what
it was. I exercised it pretty thoroughly, but had no
problems with it other than with the appearance of
strange objects I can't identify.

It seems to me that such a tool is probably quite
useful for beginners, but all it is is a graphical
shell. I've been interfacing *nix systems for over 18
years from a shell. I use shells all the time inside of
XEmacs, which is convenient for saving and tweaking the
output, and the extra level of editing interface it
gives you (e.g., opening multiple windows on the same
shell so the top part doesn't scroll off), and also
sometimes from shell windows. I certainly think that
users get a much clearer understanding of what they are
doing each step of the way if they do it from the shell
rather than hiding it all behind a tool like Nautilus.

Therefore for me, although Nautilus is an attractive
and glitzy tool with a lot of interesting
functionality, I don't really see myself using it very
often in the long run.

-- 
Lynn David Newton
Phoenix, AZ