Nautilus under Mate still necessary?

[py-thon]

While running UP7 at some point Nautilus popped up. I had not realised that it was still installed, supposing Caja had completely substituted Nautilus. Aptitude does not give any reason for its existence (apart from a cross reference to gnome-sushi and vice-versa).
Is Nautilus still necessary for LMDE Mate or can it be purged without danger?

[Meister Eckhardt]

I uninstalled Nautilus completely with Synaptic when I decided to change from Cinnamon to Mate on my laptop.

There has been no problems with the laptop since doing it one week ago.

[py-thon]

Thanks.
Maybe I'll deinstall Nautilus in a month after UP8. I am somewhat afraid that purging it will cause trouble because some programs seem to call Nautilus instead of Caja. For example (a perfect example and no joke but sad reality): when I use the context menu to open a folder with admin rights from within Caja it starts Nautilus to show this folder's contents.

[eanfrid]

Your example is caused by a config issue, it is not a feature. Remove and purge Nautilus if your only DE is MATE: Nautilus has *nothing* to do in a MATE environment.

[py-thon]

Your example is caused by a config issue, it is not a feature. Remove and purge Nautilus if your only DE is MATE: Nautilus has *nothing* to do in a MATE environment.

Mate is my only DE. I know this behaviour is not a feature, that's why I started this thread As far as I remember Nautilus is a leftover from the basic installation at a time when LMDE came with both MATE and Cinnamon.

P.S.
Should the packages libnautilus-extension1a, nautilus-data and nautilus-open-terminal be purged as well or are they used by Mate in any way?

[eanfrid]

Some nautilus-related packages might be brought by other Gnome3/GTK3 packages as dependancies (like Brasero or Totem, for example) but MATE per-se does not need them at all.

[py-thon]

Ok, you are right. aptitude why tells me that libnautilus-extension1a is needed by totem.

nautilus-data is a bit more complicated. aptitude why refers to nautilus only but synaptic wants to deinstall gnome-control-center, gnome-power-manager and gnome-settings-daemon together with nautilus-data. But all of those three packages are substituted by the ones starting with mate-... Right?

[cwsnyder]

nautilus-data also seems to be used by the brasero package. I had to re-install LMDE Mate after Xfce was dropped from support completely, and I also have your referenced packages installed. I haven't had Cinnamon installed because Cinnamon's non-removable compositor derived from GNOME 3.x crashes my computer by freezing my GPU, the same as Ubuntu's Unity's compositor.

[py-thon]

I wouldn't mind to purge brasero. It doesn't support DVD-RAM and I prefer xfburn anyway.

[eanfrid]

aptitude why refers to nautilus only but synaptic wants to deinstall gnome-control-center, gnome-power-manager and gnome-settings-daemon together with nautilus-data. But all of those three packages are substituted by the ones starting with mate-... Right?

Exact.

Also aptitude works a different way than synaptic when listing /resolving chained dependancies. I still prefer aptitude over synaptic in many cases.

[py-thon]

I uninstalled nautilus.
Now there's the problem that I can't open a folder as admin because caja wants to start nautilus, doesn't find it and uses totem, which of course doesn't work. Where is the setting to correct this behaviour?

Edit: Solved it from within the control center.

[py-thon]

Sadly the aforementioned problem is not solved and it is obviously NOT advisable to purge nautilus.
Deleting Nautilus and using Caja as root results in Caja using 100% of CPU (of one of the cores) even after Caja has been closed.

[eanfrid]

Your problem indeed lies elsewhere: I have no single bit of nautilus on all my MATE 1.6 installations, like it should be. Looks like you still have wrong/old (p)references to nautilus left in the /root folder (that is, in "root's home" folder).

[py-thon]

Looks like you still have wrong/old (p)references to nautilus left in the /root folder (that is, in "root's home" folder).

It's hard to imagine that (p)references to nautilus make caja use 100% CPU and prevent it from ending as a process when closing the window. And /root/.config/nautilus is empty.
There are others with the same problem. Some people have it as a normal user after fresh install, some only as root. It seems to be a bug in MATE: https://github.com/mate-desktop/caja/issues/176 . I suppose the next UP will fix it as the topic on github was closed three months ago (that would mean after UP7).

[Monsta]

I suppose the next UP will fix it as the topic on github was closed three months ago (that would mean after UP7).

I don't know why people keep making this mistake, but anyway, I'll have to repeat it once again: MATE packages are not part of any Update Packs, they're kept in a separate repository at packages.linuxmint.com and are updated independently from UPs.

Now about that bug and MATE updates. The packages in LMDE repo aren't gonna be updated magically just because Stefano rebuilt something in his packages. When we encountered high CPU usage by Caja for the first time, I had to email Clem so he'd rebuild the package for LMDE and the users would get the update.

Now it looks like the bug wasn't fully fixed. If you're sure the packages need to be rebuilt once more (as written in that bug report), do the same: ask Clem to take action.

[py-thon]

I don't know why people keep making this mistake

Maybe because not all of us live in a computer universe. Some of us just use the computer as a means. We don't read every single topic in all forums existing and don't know that version 1.6.1-2 is no official package from MATE-supporters but a special one from Mint-supporters (I would have supposed this if it were called 1.6.1-2-mint or something like that).
I don't understand a lot of the details. I know that I do have this problem. I know that there are people running Debian Testing having the same problem. So I would have supposed this to be a general problem not a special one related to LMDE.

When we encountered high CPU usage by Caja for the first time, I had to email Clem so he'd rebuild the package for LMDE and the users would get the update.

Now it looks like the bug wasn't fully fixed.

This was a different bug regarding thumbnails not running caja as root. If you look at https://github.com/mate-desktop/caja/issues/38 you'll realise that mate-desktop was rebuilt. Caja still is the unchanged 1.6.1-2 from your comment (3rd from bottom).

If you're sure the packages need to be rebuilt once more (as written in that bug report), do the same: ask Clem to take action.

How can I be sure about this? I am no programmer.
Where would I take action? Someplace on linuxmint.com? On github.com?

[kurotsugi]

I'd like to more on topic. you can install deborphan and run it as sudo aptitude purge $(deborphan --guess-all) to get rid all unneeded packages. as far as I know nautilus isn't not needed by MATE. nevertheless, there are severall packages i.e. brasero, file-roller, gnome-control-center etc which depends on nautilus-data.

Also aptitude works a different way than synaptic when listing /resolving chained dependancies. I still prefer aptitude over synaptic in many cases.

it depends on how you set their dependency preferences. synaptic as default include recommended packages on his calculation. on other hand, aptitude usually only calculate depended packages. you can change synaptic behaviour on setting > preferences. on tab general, uncheck 'consider recommended packages as dependencies'

[py-thon]

as far as I know nautilus isn't not needed by MATE. nevertheless, there are severall packages i.e. brasero, file-roller, gnome-control-center etc which depends on nautilus-data.

I definitely need Nautilus right now because I can't run Caja as root without running the risk that it grills my CPU.
gnome-control-center and file-roller have been substituted by mate-control-center and engrampa.
A problem is the poor documentation to the end user. At some point (update or UP) mate-control-center substituted gnome-control-center But the installation of mate-control-center didn't purge gnome-control-center. Can it be purged? I suppose so but I am not sure. And what about gnome-control-center-data and libgnome-control-center1? Can they be purged? There are no corresponding packages mate-control-center-data and libmate-control-center1. Does mate-control-center use these two gnome packages or is the functionality within mate-control-center which has twice the size of gnome-control-center but is much smaller than the three gnome-packages added.

Thanks for mentioning deborphan, it shows 162 packages on my system.

[eanfrid]

@kurotsugi: It is not only a matter of what you tune with /etc/apt/preferences or apt.conf files (btw, I have "APT::Install-Recommends "false";" in apt.conf since a long time ago ... aptitude shows and can resolve conflicts in a different manner than synaptic.

In MATE, brasero can be replaced with xfburn, file-roller is replaced with engrampa and gnome-control-center has nothing to do here...

Edit: on my main computer running Debian Wheezy + MATE 1.6 from the official MATE repos at http://repo.mate-desktop.org, there is no nautilus-related file left.

[kurotsugi]

At some point (update or UP) mate-control-center substituted gnome-control-center But the installation of mate-control-center didn't purge gnome-control-center. Can it be purged? I suppose so but I am not sure. And what about gnome-control-center-data and libgnome-control-center1? Can they be purged? There are no corresponding packages mate-control-center-data and libmate-control-center1. Does mate-control-center use these two gnome packages or is the functionality within mate-control-center which has twice the size of gnome-control-center but is much smaller than the three gnome-packages added.

if I'm not mistaken that was the transition between UP4 to UP5. at that time mate got his own control center. gnome-control-center didn't purge because it didn't conflicted with mate-control-center. if there's no package depends on it you can safely purge it. anyway, the deborphan command needs to be run more than one time. you'll need to run it until there's no packages removed or it shows that you need to run 'sudo apt-get autoremove'. let see if those gnome package survived from deborphan.

@eanfrid: /etc/apt/preferences is configuration file for apt. for aptitude the setting is accessible if you run 'aptitude' on terminal. click option, preferences, that's the one.