Comment 36 for bug 869793

I so agree with richardbrucebaxter on this. When I switched all my computers from Windows 98 to Linux in the late 90's this was the biggest practical difference. Now I know its not Linux or the file system but Nautilus that is the problem. Its exactly the same today, load up a large file on a windows system, bang its in your face, right there. On Ubuntu, it several minutes wait. This is a daily thing for me.

I hear all the arguments that say its bad practice to have large directories, but sorry I need to do this and if other file managers can cope why not Nautilus?

There are many avenues of attack, from better caching, to mult-thread, to prioritization, but this should be fixed. Now we have many file systems that are as fast as they get in this situation, Nautilus just sits on the sidelines, its a terrible shame.

Linked to this, the whole thumbnail mechanism in Nautilus is broken, because thumbnails are stored in one place per PC, when its obviously better to store locally as windows does, so that if you make a copy of a dirctory with a new name this metadata just gets copied and does not have to be recalculated. It should also be that tif you move a directory, there is no need to recalculate thumbnail metadata.

Most importantly, some of these things (large directories, local thumbnails etc) are important to some people and not important to others. Nautilus should be easily configurable to meet the needs of users and users who need this stuff should be catered for, not told that your use case is unimportant or bad practice, this argument is a circular tautology (defines itself to be true).

Please, Nautilus is a central part of the usability of Linux, please could it not be stuck in the 90's ? Please could this be given some priority, even if it is "hard".