Nautilus is shaping up to be a great file manager, and just what GNOME needs to shake the usability problems GMC poses for the current GNOME desktop. It looks clean, provides enough options to make it a comfortable and customizable fit for most users, and promises to provide much the same "all-in-one" functionality as KDE2's Konqueror.

It's still slow, however, and there are bugs that make it die from time to time. It's a good idea to remember that it ships with a script called nautilus-clean.sh, which kills stray processes it may leave behind after a crash, or just a poor shutdown. Running it for too long will take a toll on system performance at this point, but not anything untoward for software under heavy development. It's even fairly usable if you don't mind a few bugs here and there.

The real meat of this release wasn't Nautilus, as much as it has improved. It was the look Red Hat users in particular got at the services Eazel plans to offer, which have always been the reason behind the company's efforts on the Linux platform. It will be interesting to see what else comes along as it fleshes out its services model.

Next Week:
Next Friday I'll take that deferred look at Evolution, and toss in a quick look at a few other GNOME mail clients that have made some recent progress.

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