Hi, I’ve been using Linux on and off for 20ish years, finally made the switch, and the one thing that has always driven me nuts is the file managers.

As an example, when I attach images to posts on websites, I get a nice window to popup to choose which file I want. This popup is ass. It only gives me a tiny preview of the file (images) that I have currently selected. There’s no way to change views to thumbnails, right click and open in an image viewer to double check that I am uploading the correct file, none of it. I have to navigate to the folder in another window and double check filenames if there is no preview. (This is getting more common because of webp images.)

I have a host of other complaints about the file manager on here and most I’ve come across, but this is the most annoying issue for me.

I am on Ubuntu Cinnamon at the moment.

To add to this since the file picker is something different. I dislike the file manager as well because of lots of reasons, but the biggest being that when I’m using thumbnails, it looks like all the files are only slightly aligned to a grid. Everything is off by just enough to annoy the shit out of me.

    • zeus ⁧ ⁧ ∽↯∼@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      honestly i feel like that’s their attitude toward everything? maybe i missed the glory days of gnome, but now i see it as only useful if you’re A) a gnome developer, or B) have exactly the same workflow as a gnome developer. otherwise it’s useless unless you want a bunch of extensions that break every update

      • Emperor Palpapeen@mastodon.social
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        1 year ago

        @Zeus I agree! I am not sure who they think they are making it for, and I fail to understand why so many distros still default to it. It is still usable, of course, but a lot of what they have done to it is very user-hostile

        • zeus ⁧ ⁧ ∽↯∼@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          i imagine it’s just that fewer options = easier to maintain. to my knowledge they were never keen on options: gtk was never officially themeable, their gtk theme is called “the only one”, they hide all their options on dconf like the windows registry, etc.

          generally treat their users like children. but to be fair, it worked for apple and it’s sort of working for them, so what do i know?

          • Emperor Palpapeen@mastodon.social
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            1 year ago

            @Zeus and we do have options. Plasma is my go to, though I do have a Vanilla OS machine running Gnome with several extensions. It’s pretty good except for the window position thing. That’s my biggest gripe. That and the file manager being single pane, though that seems to be a computing industry standard at this point. So I install Nemo.

            • zeus ⁧ ⁧ ∽↯∼@lemm.ee
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              1 year ago

              plasma is definitely my favourite. i’m a great kde fan, i think all of their suite is much better than the gnome offering. particularly dolphin

              i’m not sure single-pane is industry standard though - all 3rd party file managers on windows support dual pane to my knowledge, and every one i can think of for linux apart from nautilus.[1] nemo’s pretty good though. i do quite like cinnamon all round, i think it beats gnome in every way (apart from wayland support)


              1. possibly even finder? not sure though ↩︎

                • zeus ⁧ ⁧ ∽↯∼@lemm.ee
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                  1 year ago

                  @Zeus finder is single pane.

                  ah fair enough, i misremembered. i don’t think i’ve ever used a mac system for more than 10 minutes whilst giving friends tech support

                  I just don’t get how they think that’s better. 😕

                  i know, it’s crap. i guess at least on mac most of the users aren’t even capable of pressing f3 to open split view (not only because macs no longer have an f3); but i don’t see why nautilus has gone down that route. it seems like such an oversight. especially as it used to exist and they removed it

                  • Emperor Palpapeen@mastodon.social
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                    1 year ago

                    @Zeus I use pathfinder for a finder replacement. Two panes. But ever since they went subscription I have been looking for alternatives. I hate subscriptions almost as much as I hate single pane.