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.
ew. heathen
probably not much on gnome/cinnamon, although i don’t know. it might work if you install the qt file picker package (maybe) but i don’t know what that is
on kde it forces gtk apps to use the qt file picker, so you don’t have to deal with the useless gtk one
i’m presuming you know what i mean by qt and gtk. if you don’t just tell me
okay i’ve never used ubuntu cinnamon, so most of this is conjecture:
if you’re on ubuntu lts and already have everything set up, not much. mint is just ubuntu[^lmde fans don’t @ me] with all the generally accepted as good fixes on the top (no snap, an easy driver manager, etc). they also add their own repos, a software manager, and some other software that’s [objectively] better than the gnome/ubuntu default offerings[^they also used to have a much better de, but not anymore]. i don’t ever see any point in using ubuntu cinnamon unless you want the non-lts versions; but if you’re already set up you won’t get that much out of switching
I mean, isn’t cinnamon just a better version of gnome 2?
I generally understand it as the frontends for the applications, no?
I was running Mint on a VM last night and it really just felt like what I am already using so I’m 100% inclined to agree.
oh yeah that’s fair. it’s only gnome 3 that’s awful
it’s just that i imagine you know more than me about linux, having used it for longer, but i didn’t want to assume that and have you floundering and confused
I’d say I’m an average user. I can use command line fine to a degree. Most of it’s just googling what I need to do and copy/pasting though, lol. Advanced stuff like building programs from source and all that is way out my scope though. I ain’t got time for all that nonsense.
same. to be honest, that’s mostly why i’m on Debian - from what i could tell it had the largest repositories. i did try arch on my laptop and one markdown editor took over half an hour to compile so i just gave up
@mihnt @Zeus I loved gnome until the whole Apple-like attitude toward theming.
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
@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 I have no clue what their intention is. Is it to become Apple with their refusal to let people theme their operating system.
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?
@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.
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)
possibly even finder? not sure though ↩︎
@Zeus finder is single pane. I just don’t get how they think that’s better. 😕