Linux Mint: Day 3, Let There be Nemo!

And the 1st day users said: “We don’t like Unity”. And Clem made Mint. And the 2nd day the users said: “We don’t like Gnome”. And Clem made Cinnamon. And the 3rd day users said: “We don’t like Nautilus”. And Clem made Nemo ..And the 7th day Mark said. “Let have 200 millions users“. And Clem laughed (jk) :)

Well, Nemo is a fork of Nautilus for Linux Mint, based on version 3.4. 

After Gnomers decision to drop Compact View, Extra Panel, Tree View, Status Bar and I can’t recall what else from Nautilus, Linux Mint made its own step and forked the file browser of Gnome. Nemo is basically a Nautilus 3.4 at the moment with just some minor patches.

You can get it from its Git (https://github.com/linuxmint/nemo) and try it out your selves; Nautilus is one of this modules that are easy to be compiled.

I didn’t find any plans about the future of Nemo, so I guess we have to wait and see.

Henry Ford outdated sayings

There are some anachronistic people that they still believe in Ford’s outdated sayings like “ If I asked my customers what they want, they simply would have said a faster horse”, but wake up, we are living in different times, back then they still had “slaves” (1861 American Civil War, Ford born in 1863).Today people’s opinion while cannot be considered totally “free” as in many cases is formed from outer factors, it counts., and it counts deep.

Clement Lefebvre does the simplest or the hardest (depending!) thing in the word, listens to the the people. Is Linux Mint a successful product? I won’t say yes, but I will say that Mint does better from other more “densely populated” projects.

Feedback please?

But does really Clem listen to the people opinions? There is a huge question mark right here. Alright, we know that there are lot of people that are against Unity and Gnome Shell, but how many are they? How many like Unity, how many like Shell, how many dislike them?

There is not any feedback about that, at least in public view. There are just some indications and these are scattered around. Gnome Foundation hasn’t the re-sources or the means (because Gnome is different from distro to distro) to run a big scale feedback while in Ubuntu, in my opinion they are “afraid” of the results and they postpone it, till they develop a better product (and they eventually will!) and get a better feedback.

A handy metric could be USC which shows that Shell scores a medium 4 stars (200 votes), Unity scores an amazing low 3 stars (418 votes), specially if we consider that results come from inside Ubuntu community. But still this is a poor conclusion and unfortunately Cinnamon isn’t there to check.

Is Mint good for Gnome?

Absolutely yes. Clem and any Clem won’t ever work for a project that they don’t like. People believe; is better to work together with Gnome rather fork it. Ok, I agree, but you have to ask the other side if he wants to. So if Mint team isn’t going to work with Gnome, is better (better than nothing) to fork it. The projects are similar anyways and patches can apply to each side. So if Mint does some cool things, Gnome will definitely benefit from it, and vice versa.

Fedora

The only thing that makes me sad, was the lost hope to see Gnome running in a “serious”, user friendly, mainstream distro like Mint.  I am using Fedora for 1,5 years and I have any right to say, Fedora is bad.. is worse than bad. Actually Fedora makes Gnome to look bad.

So why I don’t move? Fedora since release 15 (which sorry but was ..crap!), has huge, enormous improvements in every release. Fedora 16 was super better than 15, Fedora 17 is much better than 16, and Fedora 18 might be better than 17. So I keep Fedora because I know that in every version becomes better and better.

But my expectations for a better Fedora are falling apart because? Fedora gives support for 13 months (2 release cycles plus an extra bonus month), pfff.. Good things in Fedora last just 3 months, then all problems start. Is like all developers are busy with Rawhide and they abandon the stable release. Have you noticed it?

Not that Distrowatch.com is a secure metric, but Fedora has fallen in 4th position behind Mageia (which makes a crazy run) with only 1653 HPD.

A couple last things for Mint: Gnome-Shell and Nautilus/Files Vs Cinnamon and Nemo. Who has the best names? Cinnamon except a nice name has also a nice page, http://cinnamon.linuxmint.com/ with news and tutorials!

Some Nautilus News

This is the new handy Recent View of Nautilus 3.6 that shows the last viewed files.

This Nautilus is running on an Ubuntu 12.10. What I noticed running the same version of Nautilus in Fedora 18, was that the Trash is named to Wastebasket, a significant difference ;)

Finally

I wish Mint the best of luck and I hope to make it really good, just to prove that listening to the users is the best UI design choice! However I believe, despite the strong complains, that the majority of the users are thrilled with Gnome Shell, specially the rookies.