New Linux desktop software

Jeff Waugh has just arrived in Stuttgart fresh from his eight-leg trip from Sydney, and just pointed me at the SymphonyOS desktop mockups. This is one of the most exciting sets of desktop mockups I’ve seen in a long time. I’ve been spending some time thinking about basic desktop layout recently and these ideas are pretty cool.

Jeff also told me about Thunar, a very nice simple file manager being written by some of the Xfce guys.

The shortcut bar on the side matches the shortcuts from the Gtk file selector. Does the word “duh” mean anything to you? I have no idea why Nautilus doesn’t do this yet.

Also, Thunar provides browser-style navigation, which I think is a lot more usable than the spatial mode that Nautilus uses.

Jeff seemed pretty excited about this; I got the feeling Ubuntu would be switching to Thunar pretty shortly! If Red Hat and Sun follow, our hand will be forced.