It seems that spatial Nautilus is stirring up more debate in the OSS community. Nicholas Petreley has written an article for Computerworld slamming Gnome for making “another paradigm shift in basic user-interface design”. Jorge O. Castro, a Linux.ars writer, has responded with a concise rebuttal.
I like spatial Nautilus. I fell in love with it immediately after installing Gnome 2.6. I loved it so much that I defended my opinion.
But, that’s just me. I know there are plenty of people that don’t like Gnome. Many of these people use another desktop environment. In the same way, there are probably plenty of people who love the browser Nautilus. Gnome has not alienated them; the browser Nautilus is still available in 2.6.
Nicholas Petreley makes it seem as if only a Gnome developer could re-enable browser Nautilus. He states that “only way to change the default behavior of Nautilus is to set an obscure registry key via the command line or the registry editor.”
Nicholas Petreley must really be dense. As Jorge O. Castro points out, there are three independent ways to access browser Nautilus. Indeed, I discovered two of these methods within minutes of using Gnome 2.6.
Normally, I appreciate criticism. It spurs improvement. However, Nicholas Petreley’s criticism of spatial Nautilus is, for the most part, invalid. I will agree with him that there are a “myriad unintuitive keystrokes” that one must learn to efficiently use Nautilus, but, otherwise, I disagree with all of his points. His article is reminiscent of the people that run into IRC chat rooms screaming about how a program sucks because they couldn’t bother to RTFM.
there are three independent ways to access browser Nautilus.
Making it easy, to make browser mode the “DEFAULT” mode, is what he is refering to. I use a touchpad, and it pisses me to hell having to make extra clicks just to get into browser mode. I had to use the regestry editor (gconf) inorder to make non-spatial the default. This counteracts the USEABILITY gnome says they are trying to create. Sorry, but no matter how you argue it, gconf DOES NOT HAVE high useability. And what common person would know with out research to look in gconf.
So you had to use the configuration program to change the configuration, eh?