Windows File Explorer is the best in terms of features, most Linux File managers lack basic functionality
This is a very, very interesting take. I have seen nobody with this opinion in my life before
this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2026
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Did they add tabs or split view with Windows 11? It was ridiculous how they never had this in 10
It has tabs now, but they are painfully slow and janky
Suggest me a file manager
KDE dolphin. I have no idea what you are describing in half your items, but it certainly has preview panels, and lots of things you don't mention: open terminal here, synchronized terminal panel, split windows, support for browsing over SFTP, keeping folder tree as you browser down or not, zoom, etc.
What feature do you want, copilot integration?
I'd love to see COSMIC Files on par with Dolphin, and Dolphin is vastly superior to Windows file explorer in the first place.
I wish it was faster.
Having ideas is generally not enough.
Volunteers don't take requests. They take suggestions. They only act on the ones they want to.
If you want something to actuaöly get added, offering a monetary reward, hiring a dev to contribute, or contributing yourself, is the best way to go.
I've gotten several features I wanted into software I use, by adding them myself.
I'm a bit confused. I use Nautilus/GNOME Files, and I quite honestly can't think of anything it's missing that I want. Can you be more specific about this missing basic functionality? Or is it just non-Nautilus file managers?
If anything, I'm frustrated that Windows File Manager doesn't have all the features I use on Nautilus. Here's eight that just come to mind off the top of my head.
- Fully customisable quick link menu,
- Easy permission management,
- One-click drive mount/eject,
- inbuilt 7z, xz, tar, gz etc. support,
- Operation tracking (eg extraction, compression, copying) all inbuilt into the same window with a nice progress chart
- "open in terminal" option on right-click (I know windows will do this with.. some combination of buttons)
- One-click to swap between the views I want
- Actually functional search
One-click to swap between the views I want
Yeahbutt the view you choose for a given folder does not persist from session to session. It used to.... Nowadays, I use pcmanfm as a nautilus alternative, which features this retro feature. Persistence is important to me. I guess I can't see why it isn't to you....
I really want an Android-style (grid-view, spatial paradigm, or whatever) application launcher, but all I can find are so-called semantic launchers, which follow a series of key strokes. Well, nuts to that! Unless I write one with considerable personal effort, I am still stuck with a plethora of file managers of various types (orthodox and navigational), many of which are forks of older packages that try to subvert trends in user-interface design toward touch-friendly devices.
Is the GNOME app grid not a grid-view application launcher?
Fair enough about persistence, I can see why one might want it, but I genuinely haven't even thought about it in 10 years of use, and the overhead of one-click on occasion is pretty small. I probably click it less than once a month. So I can see why it's not implemented.
Interestingly it does persist other things like list sort order, so you'd have thought they'd offer the option. One wonders if they wouldn't happily accept a PR to add such a thing?
What is an android-style application launcher. You mean like as a default 'Open With' dialog? That feels like a niche want, but I mean fair enough to want it. Something like Junction not do it for you? Then just have file types you want to do that open via that instead.
Either way, it would be cool if Nautilus was extensible like GNOME shell. I don't deny this. I'm largely just confused by OPs claims.
Out of curiosity what mandatory features would you consider missing?
The problem is not the lack of ideas, it is the programmers number and tech debt.
You can contribute to Dolphin KDE Plasma File Explorer: https://develop.kde.org/
They are actually respectful and work. even on the music tagger less people use.
Windows file explorer lacked tabs when dolphin had them for a decade or so and its still not even close to even the top of file managers. Also its terrible slow, unreliable, crashes often and has 4 different UIs baked in.
Do some plugins for Dolphin, I feel like they are neat because a) other devs that want to implement a function now have a blueprint for it b) with downloads/stars metric that these add-on stores provide you get a good idea of what the community actually wants.
Also its terrible slow, unreliable, crashes often and has 4 different UIs baked in.
What now, Dolphin too?
I use Thunar. It got context-dependent "custom actions" for the context menu.
File managers often have a bunch of plugins that add extra functionality. You could check those or try write your own for what functions you would like.
Whenever I have to use windows, the file manager is the thing that pisses me off the most. It's utterly terrible to use. No tabs or extra panes. Directories exist in some kind of unspecified limbo, like recycle bin and my documents. Multiple copying is done all at once instead of queueing. Files aren't organised cleanly or clearly. If you want to change config it's hidden in a menu somewhere, you can't just edit the config files directly. Gross.
You should make your own file manager. That’s usually why people with lots of ideas do when they want to skip the middle man.
But I agree the default GUI file managers are a bit lackluster. Although the idea of it looking anything like windows makes me nauseous.
i just want a tag based file explorer, but that's way harder to do and it struggles with the core architecture of the system
You don't need tags. You need Johny Decimal
I saw this before but I wasn’t ready, I think I might be now…
okay, that is pretty good and i think it fits some good cases, but there are other where you need tags. i guess i could use this and an image explorer that supports tags. That's where my main issue is, most images are more than 1 thing at once, so I end up not knowing where to store it and my image folder is a mess of 10.000 files.
I mainly use Yazi, Dolphin and sometimes Double Commander inside my GameImages.
I like the workflow of Yazi its so fast and the plugins provide most features that I require. It is terminal based which I really started to like.