Sunday, 5 January 2025

LINUX NEEDS MORE FILE BROWSERS

 Don't panic, I'm just kidding. Linux doesn't really need any more file browsers, it already has at least 32. What it needs are some more that are as good as the ones that come standard on Windows.

 This seems to be an issue that Linux developers have been refusing to address for decades. As a Windows user switching to Linux, I think it's one of the big issues that send so many Microsoft refugees straight back to Windows. Most Linux file browsers suck...

This is the process I went through looking for a good file browser when I was trying out some different Linux distros. Articles like this one proudly proclaim "there are 32 options for Linux file browsers" but I actually tried out about half of them (the others were mainly total geek stuff such as command line based ones, so clearly not what I was looking for), and there was only one I liked that did everything I wanted - NEMO (Which is the default file browser on both Linux Mint & Linux Zorin). 
 
 
There was actually only one other file browser I liked (Dolphin, the default file browser on KDE distros), but even that had an issue I would need to sort out before I could use it (it didn't display my PCloud drive), and I thought most of the others were completely hopeless. 
 
 
In fact there were less than half a dozen that I even thought were almost as good as the default file browser on Windows XP (Yes, XP from 2001!) but as with many things, this elephant in the Linux room seems to go unnoticed by most geeks.

 
The fact that it was Linux Mint that developed the Nemo file browser, thereby fixing the glaring hole that has made Linux all but unusable for non geeks for decades, was another aspect of what convinced me Mint is the best Linux distro.

 
I have over a 1/4 million files and the Nemo file browser is the main program that enabled me to switch to using Linux. Without a decent file browser I would be completely lost on Linux.