Notes from the Mousepad

Dear Yahoo!

Welcome to Ubuntu! As a regular contributor to the Ubuntu project, I think it’s great that you are partnering with Canonical.  Because of the agreement you signed, Canonical will be able to hire more people to work on Free software.  Also, your contributions will help Ubuntu continue offering their OS at no cost to users.  These are great things.

As things get going, though, there is one big thing (or a set of big things centered around one request) that you need to do to make the Ubuntu-Yahoo! user experience better.  In short, you need to index the crap out of Ubuntu- and Linux-related sites.  For example, if I do a Yahoo! search for launchpad bug 387765, I need the first link that comes up to be a link to the actual bug page for Launchpad bug #387765.  As it stands now, a Yahoo! search for that phrase brings up two results, neither of which are relevant.  The first of the two results is a link to the Debian Bugs page on Launchpad.  As a contributor, this is not what I need.

For comparison, the same search on Google brings up 273 results, with the first result being a direct link to the bug report on Launchpad (which is now closed, thanks to the efforts of Fabien Tassin and the other Chromium packagers and hackers)).  Google’s results not only link me directly to the bug that I am inquiring about, but also link me to a large number of pages that may be relevant to that bug report.

The example that I provide above concerns search results that are beneficial for contributors and developers, but what about regular users?  When I search Yahoo! for “Dual boot Windows 7 and Ubuntu,” the first page in the search results is for the Ubuntu 8.04 “Dual Booting,” official documentation page.  This page is out of date, especially given our migration to Grub2 in the 9.10 release.

These are just two examples, and my searches are likely not representative of the multitudes of search requests made daily on your site for Ubuntu-related tasks.  Moreover, I won’t pretend to understand how incredibly complex indexing the web can be.  I’m just writing to note that there is room for improvement, and I would like to see improvement so that our users can use your service to get relevant search results.

After all, improving Linux-related searches would be a win-win for us and for you.  Ubuntu developers and users would get their work done, and problems solved, more quickly and effectively, and you would get more regular users performing their searches on Yahoo!  This sounds pretty good to me.  Here’s to hoping it can happen.

Update: The updated version of Thunar with network share support will be included as part of Xfce 4.8, sure to be featured by all of the distributions that ship Xfce (e.g., Fedora 15, Xubuntu 11.04, OpenSUSE 11.4, and many others).

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Congratulations to Jannis Pohlmann on the release of Thunar 1.1.0!  For those who don’t know, Thunar is the Xfce file manager, and this release marks a major milestone for Thunar and for the Xfce project.  Why is this release so noteworthy?  With this new version of Thunar, users will be able to access networked file systems (SFTP shares, FTP shares, Samba shares, etc.) from within the file manager itself.

This means that desktop users will be able to access their networked files and folders via a couple of clicks.   Users of previous versions of Thunar who wanted to access network folders would have to hack around with FUSE file systems, or use a separate application altogether.  Configuring a special file system, or having to open a different file manager application to get files and folders on a network do not represent user-friendly approaches to networked computing.  Thus, providing network-share support from within the file manager represents a major improvement to the Xfce user experience.

Admittedly, for long-time GNOME and KDE users (or even for Windows or Mac users), adding network-share support to the file manager may not seem like a big deal. The respective GNOME and KDE file managers, Nautilus and Konqueror (or Dolphin), have provided network-share support for some time.  However, Xfce is a much smaller project than GNOME or KDE, so I’m sure that people can appreciate the effort of a small group of developers working to add important end-user functionality such as this.

For long-time Xfce users who don’t want or need the new network share support, and would prefer that things stay as simple and lightweight as possible, there is good news for you, too.  Jannis will be issuing a maintenance release of Thunar that includes several of the improvements from the 1.1.0 release, but uses the previous back-end of Thunar, called Thunar-VFS.  Thunar-VFS does not support native access to network shares.  Thus, individuals who package Thunar for their Linux/BSD distributions will be able to choose whether or not they want to incorporate the new network-share features into their packaged version of Thunar.

While the network-share support is the most prominent improvement that comes with this release of Thunar, several other improvements are also included.  Have a look at the release notes (best viewed in Firefox) if you want the full-scoop on the improvements and new features that come with this new release of Thunar.

[edit] as John Carr indicated in the comments, the GIO/GVfs back-end is the result of the hard work of GNOME developers, so credit is due to them, as well.  Also, the performance of the GIO/GVfs back-end has not been tested in comparisons against the Thunar-VFS back-end.  Thank you for the comment, John.

The Xubuntu team will be holding a meeting this Sunday, January 10th, at 20:00 UTC, and all are welcome to attend.

The primary focus of this meeting will be on team governance, as Cody Somerville is transitioning out of his role as primary project leader.  With that, we’ll be discussing changes to the Xubuntu Strategy Document.  However, there are still a few other topics to be discussed, and you can add topics to the agenda.

Hope to see you there!