Thanks to readers who have helped me, and to the Fedora Project for offering a very solid GNOME 3.x environment in what is now the Fedora 18 beta, I'm getting the hang of working in GNOME 3.6 (as opposed to the GNOME 3.4 version of the desktop environment in Debian Wheezy).

My previous complaints centered on what I thought were the absence of the "Connect to Server" and "Create Empty File" functions in the Nautilus file manager, now pretty much called Files in the world of GNOME.

As you can see from the screen images above, the "Connect to Server" link has moved into the upper panel. Click on the "Files" icon and a menu opens. Not terribly intuitive, as I'm used to menus in the application window, but once somebody let me know about it, I was able to connect to remote serves in Nautilus/Files once again. (Click each image for a full-sized view of my desktop in the live environment of the Fedora 18 beta.)

As far as the "Create Empty Document," feature in Nautilus/Files, someone told me that adding a text file to the Templates folder would restore the "New Document" right-click feature to Nautilus.

That worked. I created an empty text file, stashed it in Templates, and now, as you can see in the screenshots below (again, click for full-sized versions), I can either use the Template version or, as in the Nautilus of yore, do what I want: Create an empty document:

Note: Nautilus/Files is disconnecting my FTP session a bit too quickly for my taste. But it does let me start it up again with a minimum of trouble.

I've taken to using the Gigolo program to connect to FTP/SFTP servers. And not just with the Thunar file manager in Xfce but also with Nautilus in GNOME 3.4.2 in Debian Wheezy. Gigolo offers a solid, quick way to connect to remote filesystems. Even though Nautilus and Thunar in Xfce 4.10 offer this capability (as used to write this entry), Gigolo is more consistent in terms of getting me connected and remembering my bookmarks, which Nautilus always seems to lose in GNOME 3.4.2.