14 DAY TRIAL // Ubuntu GNOME's Jeremy Bicha is announcing today that the soon-to-be-released Nautilus 3.24 file manager will be implemented in the Ubuntu 17.10 operating system, whose development will start in late April this year.
It's a known fact that Ubuntu is always shipping with an older Nautilus version because Canonical always includes some patches to offer certain functionality to users. And it looks like these patches need to be updated every time a new Nautilus version is out, though some of them have failed to work because of the file manager's constant refactoring.
Nautilus 3.24 will have numerous improvements that we've detailed for our readers earlier this week. It will launch next month on March 22, as part of the GNOME 3.24 desktop environment. At the moment, Canonical is using Nautilus 3.20.x for Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak), as well as the upcoming Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) release.
Dropping type-ahead search from Nautilus, enabling Tracker by default
According to the developer, the new Nautilus 3.24 packages should land in the repositories of Ubuntu 17.10 as soon as the OS is declared open for development, which should happen shortly after the April 13 release of Ubuntu 17.04. However, it looks like it won't ship with the type-ahead search feature some of you are currently using.
"Years ago, Nautilus dropped the type-ahead search feature. Ubuntu has had a patch to hack it back in. The patch will be dropped soon after the archives open for 17.10 development in April unless someone is able to get it working with the new version," said Jeremy Bicha. "Even if it is fixed now, it will likely be broken by future versions."
The good news, however, is that recent Nautilus versions come with a much-improved built-in search, which can be made even better if GNOME's Tracker search engine is enabled by default in Unity. Of course, Nautilus 3.24 also needs to be patched to work with the Unity Launcher, as well as to address some other Ubuntu-related issues.