The Nautilus file manager is great for browsing your files and folders, but it lacks a dedicated way to see all your drives a how much space is left on each – but you can add one.
Nautilus My Computer is a third-party view for GNOME Files providing a centralised page listing drives, with storage usage bars to show which mounts, volumes, partitions, etc., have room to spare and which are getting full.
Drives can be interacted with like folders, so double-click on one to enter it or right-click to access options to open it in new tab, or window or to unmount or eject, etc., depending on the drive/mount type.
A ‘Preferred Folders’ section sits at the top of the view showing common folders and locations. This can be managed; you can pin your most-used folders here for quicker access and remove the things you don’t find useful.
The overview page can present as a big or compact view, the different being visible in the in the screenshot at the top of this article.
A customisable computer view
Customise and fine-tune Files‘ sidebar
Right-click Computer at the top of the sidebar to open the add-on’s settings. From there, you can customise which drives are shown, including system partitions like EFI, boot and swap, and whether to show drives separated by type or merged together.
You can also change the colour of usage bars shown beneath drives if the default system accent colour isn’t your vibe. And if you want Nautilus to open in My Computer view each time you start it (rather than your Home folder), there’s a toggle for that.
Nautilus My Computer also gives you greater control over Nautilus’ sidebar, letting you hide entries like as Recent or Starred, and change sidebar icons for bookmarks and locations, which is great when adding custom folders.
Miller columns in Nautilus? Oh yes
An oft-request feature is included
This add-on also offers an optional (beta-grade) Column View that offers Miller-style browsing. Select a folder to see its contents in the next column, keeping the folders above in view so you can see where you are.
And yes, you can drag and drop files between columns too, which is useful.
Selecting a file (rather than folder) in column view pens a file preview column showing simple file stats. Multiple selected files are rendered as a stack, as in Finder on macOS, with a combined file size for the selection.
Install Nautilus My Computer on Ubuntu
To use this you need to add a third-party repository and install a package from outside of Ubuntu’s official, supported archives.
You can install My Computer view from a PPA maintained by the developer. It has a pre-built package for Ubuntu 26.04 LTS (resolute) with GNOME 50, but support for 26.10 (stonking) is planned:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:yannmasoch/nautilus-my-computer
sudo apt install nautilus-my-computer
Fully quit/restart Nautilus after installing this to ensure it drops into place.
Worth installing?
Nautilus had a traditional Computer view of its own in the past, but it was removed in 2012, since it duplicated entries in the sidebar. Drives could later be accessed from Other Locations, but that view got retooled in GNOME 47 as a Network section
Since mounts/drives appear in the sidebar, the Properties dialog shows free space and getting to / requires a click on the path bar and a key press, there’s arguably no need for a dedicated view.
Still, that doesn’t mean such a view isn’t convenient for some. This effort gives those who miss one, the ability to have one.
But as a third-party integration that patches itself into Nautilus (not an official GNOME feature or using an official API), you should only install this if you’re aware it may be broken by future system updates to Nautilus and may affect the file manager’s stability.
Thanks to Kinggo!
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