What's the deal with all the file managers?

[rye_]

Hi,

I find myself occasionally looking at gnomefiles.org, and one of the things that I don't understand at all is the number of high quality gtk+ file managers.


nautilus, thunar, pcmanfm, xffm, tux commander, Rox, minigtk+ file manager, GBrowser, GCommander, Scytha, gFast, Filer, FileCentral.

What's the point?
why should I wish to not use nautilus on gnome, and replace it with pcmanfm?

Cheers, Ryan

[Steveway]

Because other file-managers could be, faster, more featureful, completely different?
Just go ahead and try everything out, maybe you'll find something you like.

[DrMega]

You could equally ask yourself, "why would I want to use Nautilus when there is <whatever> other that I like better?".

[Therion]

What's the point?

Choice.

[mentallaxative]

I don't have a very new or powerful computer. Why would I use Nautilus, which eats up a large amount of ram and slows my whole system down, when I can use Pcmanfm, which does exactly the same thing I want?

I've actually been thinking of writing my own, as a small project, when I become more skilled. Something horribly bare-boned and featureless--I'll call it "minimalist" or "spartan" and market it as an advantage over the alternatives to cover up for my inadequacies and laziness. 8)

[Antman]

choice.
+1

[rye_]

I can understand choice, to some extent.
But I don't see all the file managers as being completely distinct in terms of system resource use or functionality. In these circumstances choice comes down to a name, perhaps minor differences in layout etc.

That said, I don't mean to knock the people who write these apps, there very skilled, and I wish had a fraction of their abilites.

[SomeGuyDude]

It's choice, like everything else.

I'll say this: Nautilus demolished my RAM in Intrepid. It would go up to 400-500MB at times and I had to kill it to get things back down.

[OutOfReach]

As everyone else has said, it's the choice. I much prefer either Thunar or PCManFM than Nautilus or Konqueror because of Nautilus's and Konqueror's memory usage.

[handy]

Inspired by Jonathon Potter's wonderful Directory Opus (for the Amiga), I wrote a dirutil for the Amiga called GrOpus, as my first name is Greg & I thought it was funny. It took me six months, of long days, learning the language CanDo 3.* as I went.

I made GrOpus just the way I wanted it to be, it suited me down to the ground, apart from one thing I just could not get it to do, which drove me nuts, eventually a friend who is a pro' programmer had a look & told me I was doing it right, CanDo was at fault.

Anyway I had lots of fun & gained a great deal of stimulation/satisfaction/education out of creating Gropus.

By the way, none of the available dirutils for the distro's really satisfy me, but I doubt I'm going to get motivated to learn a new language & write one that does.

[wolfen69]

It's choice, like everything else.

I'll say this: Nautilus demolished my RAM in Intrepid. It would go up to 400-500MB at times and I had to kill it to get things back down.

wow. nautilus only uses 13mb for me in hardy.(with instances of it open) hardly bloated. (don't bother cardinals_fan)

i see people are talking about nautilus's memory usage being high. are people running on minimal ram? (128 or less)

[smartboyathome]

Only uses 14mbs here on my Intrepid install at rest. It mostly uses CPU on the big folders.

[wolfen69]

i can understand if someone has 256 or less, but nowadays memory is pretty much dirt cheap. if you don't have 384 or greater, you should definitely use puppy or dsl. minimal installs work too. but to say nautilus is bloated "screams" that you lack memory and cpu speed. most modern systems will laugh at ubuntu's requirements.

[mentallaxative]

Another very good reason for not running Nautilus is if you are not using Gnome at all. And yes, that happens. The file manager universe doesn't revolve around Gnome and Nautilus I'm afraid.

[3rdalbum]

i can understand if someone has 256 or less, but nowadays memory is pretty much dirt cheap.

For over a decade memory has been "nowadays cheap, so buy as much as you can" :-) It's just that the cost-per-megabyte keeps coming down.

I tried using Konqueror and Dolphin for file managers, but in the end I preferred Thunar to both of them, and Nautilus to Thunar. However, if I preferred anything else, I'd be glad that it existed.

Rox Filer is part of another project called ROX Desktop that aims to reimplement the RiscOS interface on Linux. For those who know RiscOS, you'd know that the file manager has to specifically support the RiscOS-y kind of things :-)

[handy]

I had looked a ROX maybe a couple of years ago, I don't remember if I tried it or just read a web page on it.

I just installed the ROX Filer on Arch, it will take me a little while to get used to it, it is different. It shows its preference for drag n drop. It looks quite fast at quick glance too.

[kerry_s]

i use rox for gui and clex for command line.

[cardinals_fan]

i use rox for gui and clex for command line.
Clex is a very good program.

[Grant A.]

The reason is because some file managers are bundled with things, and others aren't. Ex. Rox is minimalistic and isn't bundled with anything so it can go on fluxbox nicely without bloat, while on the other end, something like konqueror is slow, and automatically installs a lot of kde libs. Linux is all about choice, and that's what alot of these are for. :guitar: