Monday, August 6, 2012

Linux Mint Forks Nautilus

The new Nautilus, in Ubuntu 12.10 (currently under development)
You can see that some work needs to be done in terms of theming, but then again 12.10 is not even in its beta phase.
For the past few weeks now, GNOME has taken a twist, probably for the worst. Their new slimmer version of Nautilus (their file manager/browser) is actually taking away features, and removing functions. Millions of people are making an outcry about this, and with good reason. Users of Linux Mint though will be able to breath a sigh of relief, because it is announced today that they are forking Nautilus.

Linux Mint has a history of forking stuff, giving support for the MATE desktop environment (a fork of GNOME 2, and currently supported although GNOME 2 is now dead), and even forking GNOME 3 to make its Cinnamon desktop and the GNOME 3 window manager Mutter as Muffin. This fork of Nautilus was expected though, because it did not follow the same principles as their Cinnamon desktop.

And with that, a new file manager is born. The name will be....wait for it...... Nemo. It’s billed by its developers as simply a ‘file manager for Cinnamon’ (the default desktop in Linux Mint), and is very early on in its development. So when can you expect to use it?

No indications thus far, but much like the desktop shell it’s aimed at chances are Nemo will find its way onto the desktops of Ubuntu users as soon as possible.