Desktop integration
Do these file managers play nice with other programs?
File managers come in different shapes and sizes but thankfully, they’re no longer so intricately tied to their native desktop environment that you can’t install any of the ones on our list on top of your current desktop environment. That said, it would be unfair to judge these projects harshly if a feature doesn’t work as advertised outside of their native environment. Both GnomeFiles and Thunar enable you to set a selected image as the wallpaper from the right-click context menu. On our Fedora 27 Gnome installation, GnomeFiles performed this task flawlessly, but Thunar could not. You can also create compressed archives of selected files or send them as an email attachment with GnomeFiles, but nothing else.
Out of the box, Dolphin is highly integrated into the desktop, even on top of Gnome, but only if you’ve installed KDE. This is because some of its features, such as create file project with K3b, Send as mail and encrypt rely on KDE-centric programs such as Kmail and Kgpg respectively.
All the projects recognise many different file types and provide appropriate actions such as extracting files from an archive, installing/ uninstalling rpm packages, mounting ISO images, and so on.
Apart for XFE, all this month’s projects make it possible to select files and send them as an email attachment, which requires the default email client to be configured. While it supports the option to email files, SpaceFM’s implementation of the feature is flaky – offering the option for only some file types, but not all.