A new version of the Nautilus file manager is available in the latest daily builds of Ubuntu 23.04 ‘Lunar Lobster’.
If you read our sister site omg! linux you’ll already know of one particular change that makes Nautilus 44 an especially exciting update: the return of Expandable Folders in List View option.
Accessible from the file manager’s Preferences panel, this opt-in behaviour makes it faster to flit through folders to find a specific file when using list view (this feature doesn’t work in icon view). When enabled you’re able to expand and collapse folders tree view style to maintain a top-level overview of directory structure while navigating.
Now, this feature is not “new” per se as older versions of Nautilus include this feature. But, over the past few years GNOME developers refactored and rebuilt Nautilus’ various views to make them more modern, malleable, and maintainable. Thus the expanded folder feature had to be re-worked too.
Development continues on GNOME 44, including Nautilus. Another file-manager adjacent improvement also present in the dailies: icon view in the GTK file picker. This solves a long-standing complaint from users, though it’s worth stressing that this feature wasn’t über-trivial to implement so its omission until now wasn’t by intent.
Further improvements and new features can expected elsewhere in the GNOME desktop ahead of the GNOME 44 stable release in March. The bulk of GNOME 44 should be present in Lunar by the time the Ubuntu 23.04 Beta rolls out, so if you don’t want to dice with dailies you may prefer waiting for for that.