Nautilus typeahead

General Help
22

No I don't think it's unsafe at all, but the problem could appear if there is an official update of the official nautilus (too many officials here lol), if the dev follow all nautilus updates it's OK, but if it's not, what changes could happens and where? As it's a file manager a crucial tool, you should be sure there are no updates which interfered with this patched version

23

A file manager isn't just a viewer: it's the tool you trust with your files

Showing files is the easy part. The hard part is everything that can go wrong while you copy, move, replace or extract them, and making sure you never lose anything. Here's what Odysseus guarantees, each point tested on throwaway folders next to a "precious" folder that must never change:

  • Replacing a file: your old file stays in place until the new one is completely copied and safely on disk. Disk full, USB key pulled out, power cut halfway? You still have your old file, never half of one.
  • Moving files: only what has really been copied is deleted from the source. Skipped, failed or cancelled items stay where they were. Between two disks, originals are only deleted once the copies are physically written, so a power cut can't make you lose both.
  • Crash mid-copy: files are copied under a hidden temporary name and only get their real name once complete. No truncated file that looks normal (tested by actually killing Odysseus at the worst moment).
  • USB keys and Windows disks: forbidden characters are cleaned, Photo.jpg and photo.jpg don't overwrite each other, files over 4 GB are refused on FAT32 before writing, not after.
  • Nothing overwritten silently: archives, extractions, PDFs, converted images get "name (2)" if the name is taken. Overwriting only happens when you choose "Replace".
  • trapped archives: paths like ../../.bashrc or links pointing outside can't escape the destination folder. "Delete archive after extraction" keeps it if anything was skipped.
  • Undo that doesn't bite: undo never overwrites a file created in the meantime.

All of this runs as automated tests (simulated crashes, power cuts, full disks, canceled copies, real FAT disks, trapped archives) before every release.

So yes, a file manager shows you your files, but its real job is to make sure that whatever happens, your files come out intact.

1 Like
24

At the moment, there are only few nautilus updates for noble. The last one is from November 2025, and the last one from the ppa is from December 2025 (a month later).
I'd feel more safe if it were an official package from Zorin. But the patch has not much lines of code, so it should not change many things in nautilus, or?

The default nautilus doesn't offer some of the Odysseus features mentioned either to better protect against data loss.