Will be available as part of the GNOME 3.24 desktop

Feb 21, 2017 23:22 GMT  ·  By

The GNOME 3.24 desktop environment is coming in only one month from today, on March 22, and it will bring with it a lot of new features for many of its core components and applications, including the Nautilus (Files) file manager.

GNOME developer Carlos Soriano is sharing with us today the upcoming features of Nautilus 3.24, as well all the improvements and bug fixes that landed so far, and what didn't make it in the release, which will be available for all users as part of the GNOME 3.24 Stack.

Besides the new keyboard we've told you about when Nautilus 3.24 Beta was released, the number one feature of Nautilus 3.24 appears to be easier access to files and folders that belong to the root user. Many of you already know that, to access these type of items, you have to start Nautilus from the command-line with the sudo command, as root (system administrator).

Well, things have been made a lot easier in Nautilus 3.24, and all you have to do to access files owned by root is to double click a folder, enter the root password, and voilà! The good news is that the password is saved for a limited time so you won't have to introduce it every time you access the respective folder(s). A demo video is attached at the end of the article to see the new feature in action.

"Now if you try to open a folder that requires special permissions it will ask for the root password with a dialog and once provided it will allow the user to navigate them without needing to restart the application or opening a new instance," explains Carlos Soriano. "The password is saved with a timeout so you can use access the file for some time, as is common with PolKit."

Nautilus desktop now supported on Wayland sessions

The good news continues with the fact that Nautilus 3.24 will bring desktop support for Wayland sessions. What this means exactly is that you'll be able to use your desktop while in Wayland just like you're using it right now on the normal X11 session. Of course, this requires XWayland to work correctly, and it looks like it was also backported to Nautilus 3.22 so you won't have to wait until next month for the new release.

Another interesting feature that landed in Nautilus 3.24 is the implementation of an animation effect to the button with a pie chart which shows you the progress of an operation, such as copy or move. A demo video can be viewed below to see what exactly we're talking about, and the GNOME/Nautilus developers would like your feedback on this one.

A lot of other small improvements have been implemented in Nautilus 3.24 to make your desktop and file browsing experience a lot better when using GNOME or another desktop environment that relies on the GNOME Stack, and there's also a new Flow box view that you can see in action if you watch the third video attached below. For more details, we recommend reading the entire blog post by Carlos Soriano.