Ubuntu developers just pushed some patches to Nautilus

Feb 8, 2016 18:47 GMT  ·  By

A Nautilus developer explained the good nature of the relations between Ubuntu and GNOME teams and said that the apparent conflicts between the two projects exist only in the minds of people not involved in any of them.

A large part of the Linux community imagines a conflict between the Ubuntu and Nautilus projects, but the truth is that's not really the case. If anything, the developers on these two projects talk to each other on a regular basis, and they do a lot of work in the same direction.

GNOME is upstream for Ubuntu, so Canonical usually submits patches that could change various things in the packages they are using in Unity. It's not clear how this idea came about that Ubuntu and GNOME don't get along, but it probably stems from the original implementation of Unity.

Not so long ago, Ubuntu was powered by GNOME 2, and all was well. This Linux distribution was growing a lot back then, and the Ubuntu team was sometimes blamed for problems in Nautilus. They were sending patches upstream, but some of those patches weren't accepted, for various reasons. Ubuntu decided to make their own Unity thing to avoid having to rely too much on GNOME.

Not the stuff of dramas

One of the Nautilus developers posted a very comprehensive update regarding the features of the upcoming 3.20 release, but he also responded to someone who mentioned “history” between the two projects.

He said that the next Ubuntu is an LTS one and they didn't have the time to make all the changes they had to. There is a lot of stuff going on in Ubuntu, not just the file manager.

“As for the history between Gnome and Ubuntu, I think most of misunderstandings between Gnome and Ubuntu are done by the people not involved neither in Gnome or Ubuntu,” GNOME developer Carlos Soriano said. That puts a really nice bow on the entire discussion.