Day 56 - MISSED; Nautilus update is irritating, switching to Dolphin(?)

14 Apr 2017 Tweet 100daysofwriting · comedy · missed · nautilus · open-mic · rant · ubuntu · update

So, I recently updated to Ubuntu 16.04. (Not really recently, I updated 41 days ago :O )

Alongwith the update of the distribution update, I got an update for most of the native apps. One of them: NAUTILUS. That’s the file manager thing on Ubuntu. It’s standard, it’s everywhere, I loved it. Used to love it. Now, they have done something annoying.

Most people have many partitions, I have several of them. Some of them are encrypted, some of them are NTFS to transfer files between Windows and Ubuntu, etc etc. Earlier, there was just one icon on the left-side task bar. Clicking once and opening it anywhere would add a window there. And now, things are different.

Each partition opens in a new window and all nautilus windows are not grouped together. Instead, partition windows are grouped together. This is INCREDIBLY inconvenient. I don’t have any partition up top because that takes up a lot of icons, and that’s not what I want to waste space on. So they are dumped right at the bottom of the sidebar, and it’s so HARD to navigate and copy files between partitions. I have absolutely not clue why or when they decided to go ahead and do this.

The problem is so bad that even if you open a new tab in a window and then open a new partition in that, then the tab appears as a window with some weird stuff happening. (Like if I have partition 1 open in the first tab and partition 2 in the second tab, clicking on the partition 2 brings that window into focus although visibly there’s only one window!)

It seems that they have simply removed having a Nautilus window unless it’s in the Home partition. Everything else is another window. It’s so frustrating, I am going to be going out there and looking for a saner way to manage my files. (I am installing Dolphin right now, hopefully Dolphin manages this situation better)

I know that I promised to write about Homeland’s season 6 finale, but this particular rant took precendence over that. I have been silently enduring this for long enough, I figured.

Another interesting application I just installed was GnuCash. I use terminal-wallet for my day-to-day finances and an Excel sheet for a larger picture. GnuCash looks like the right replacement for the larger picture one, it has a sweet interface that I already like, but I haven’t tested it out well, and the number and type of accounts is confusing. I am not surprised by that though, I will crack it.

P.S. Today was also the day of an Open Mic called Live at the Apollo 13, there were 6 acts and it was GOOD! I missed the first time that this happened (last year) for some mundane reason, Yesterday was GOOD!

POST #56 is OVER