Nautilus sidebar changes from 14.04 to 16.04 – Part One
 

My computer is set up with separate physical hard drives or partitions for many of the things I "share" across different operating systems, whether two versions of Ubuntu (14.04 and 16.04) or virtual machines (Windows XP or Fedora 21). Examples are Documents, Genealogy research, Music, Development projects and so forth.

In Ubuntu, this is accommodated by either:
1) adding lines to the end of /etc/fstab such as "/mnt/Documents /home/Me/Documents auto bind 0 0" in order to make Ubuntu believe my partition is my Documents directory, or
2) mounting the separate partitions with fstab entries such as "UUID=5c898a6f-b829-4046-9ccd-ae3c6badc558 /mnt/Development ext4 nodev,nosuid,commit=10 0 0"

Nautilus now presents this information differently: In Ubuntu 14.04, the sidebar is configured something like this:
Places
_____Recent
_____Home
_____Desktop
_____et cetera, et cetera
Devices
_____Unmounted, but attached, drives
_____Computer
_____et cetera, et cetera
Bookmarks
_____Development
_____Genealogy
_____et cetera, et cetera
Network
_____Connect to Server

Each section was clearly identified with a header/title, and while I would have liked it arranged differently, it at least appeared to have some reasonable taxonomy (organized by type of attached device – more about that in the next post).

Now, with Ubuntu 16.04, the equivalent Nautilus sidebar looks something like the following:
Recent
Home
Desktop
et cetera
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Unmounted, but attached, drives
Computer
… et cetera, et cetera
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Development
Genealogy
… et cetera, et cetera
- - thin divider line
Connect to Server

There are no headers/titles on the sections which now makes them appear to be a random collection of “places” to choose from. The taxonomy remains the same, but it isn’t at all apparent what it is.

I searched in vain for some configuration in the menus, config files, and so forth; I tried different themes to see if somehow they might be involved. Is there a way anyone knows of to get the section titles back? If not, does anyone know what the rationale was for this change? Is it a change from the Gnome folks, or did Canonical’s employees just feel like tinkering with it (it’s not like there aren’t a lot of actually broken things in Unity the developers could have worked on).

Can anyone point me in the right direction? Thanks in advance.

I only picked this thread up because you are on the zero-replies list, twice.

TL;DR Don't share /home/me between different versions of linux.

Sharing /home/me between distros will cause you problems:

Different distros will expect different /home/.config_whatever files to have differing formats and entries. They are unlikely to understand each other. They are essentially different operating systems, and you should not expect them to share the exactly same configuration files because they are, different.

Then there will also be differences between the /usr/share/whatever files (and there are many) depending on what distro you are booting.

It might be better to put your

~/Documents
~/Music
~/Pictures

on a separate partition, mounted, perhaps as /home/Shared-Stuff

This may not save you from different email handlers remembering what you have or have not read, where your replies should be filed and whatever unless you have submitted to you-know-who "managing" ( = "reading, indexing and cross-referencing, and selling on your possible purchasing interests") your email.

Best,

Thanks much for the response, but apparently I wasn't all that clear, so let me elaborate on what I meant:

First the "/home/me" issue: That "me" was just supposed to be a filler meaning "whatever." I suppose I should have written it as "/home/*" or something similar. I had forgotten, I suppose, that there are folks who might actually use "me" for a user name (and, yes, I would probably been as aggravated as you are to see that!!!)

Second the external partitions that I attach are only to placeholders in the relevant home/* directories. Ergo, my Documents partition might be mounted to /home/me-1/Pictures in one OS, while the same partition is mounted to /home/me-2/Pictures on another. Same arrangement with the others you mentioned. Actually, until I dumped Windows a few years back, it too shared these partitions, but they've all since been converted over to ext as I can't imagine a scenario where I would install another version of Windows (although I do keep an old XT in a virtual machine just so I can use my pre-Microsoft version of Visio, since there isn't yet anything as good for Linux that I'm aware of).

Nothing at all is "shared" between the various OS home/* directories on my machine - particularly in the case of Canonical/Ubuntu, a lot of locations change names randomly (??) between releases - and I'm not adventurous enough to attempt that. I do have certain backups (e.g. LibreOffice templates, Firefox profiles, and similar) that I copy over to any new home/* in a new installation, but only in cases where the applications are designed for that to happen. Backup configurations (which refer to specific homes and mount points), for example, always need to be created carefully; these can be cribbed from other installations, but need to be hand-massaged; I typically just set such things up from scratch.

Having said all that, I still can't account for some of the differences I see between Ubu14.04 and 16.04 - I suppose they could have just changed some things for the sake of changing them, but I'd still like to know how I can either reorder the entries or at least put back the dividers that indicated a) where the groups were divided and b) what the rationale was for the division.

But thanks much for the reply; I really was getting lonely ...

--Frank