14 DAY TRIAL // A new GNOME major upgrade is on its way, and it will ship with Nautilus 3.20. One of the developers working on it has presented some of the major features that will land.
Nautilus or Files is one of the most visible and used components of the GNOME stack. The file manager is used by numerous Linux distributions, so any changes made to it will be noticed immediately by people. Very few users actually remove Nautilus and try something else, while having the GNOME stack installed.
Nautilus has been going through some changes, and it has received major improvements in the past few editions of GNOME. To be fair, Nautilus is the kind of package that is always getting work done, so it's not all that unusual.
Nautilus 3.20 is really impressive
From what GNOME developer Carlos Soriano said on his blog, Files 3.20 is going to be one big point of interest for the 3.20 branch.
"For me personally, I mostly focused on fixes, because during 3.16 and 3.18 lot of changes made in, but it was time with all the experience I gathered to start fixing old and hard bugs. Some of that work is uninteresting for most of users, because they are use cases that are no so common. But still, Nautilus is used in lot of different ways with very different workflows, and I wanted to make sure those workflows were working properly," Carlos said.
The developer spent quite a lot of time to fix some of the issues that have been plaguing Nautilus, like crashes when opening large jp2 images, infinity waiting on search, icon snapping, style of the desktop window, and much more.
Also, Nautilus 3.20 will also ship with a shortcuts window, new options in File Preferences, and, of course, a new search popover UI that allows much better filtering in folders, that respects date, file type, and many others. Make sure that you read the entire blog post of Carlos for more details about this release.
GNOME 3.20 is expected to land on March 23.
