The verdict
On paper, all the tools in this Roundup are fairly well matched. XFE, despite being a single developer project does well to hold its own against mighty projects supported by a robust team of dedicated developer and vast user communities. Not only does XFE lack any plugins or extensions, it also doesn’t support any network protocols. This lack of support for SMB, NFS and other protocols is unfortunate and so XFE comes in last, despite its robust search capabilities.
Unfortunately, Thunar has almost no search skills to speak of, and is thus out of the podium race. Despite taking the last two spots, Thunar and XFE are not without merit. If you’re unlikely to use a file manager to connect with remote machines, you’ll be pleased with XFE’s simplicity and performance.
Even though SpaceFM doesn’t yet support undo/redo operations, it ranks higher than GnomeFiles in the useful feature test because of its robust path bar, which can be used to run commands without first launching a separate terminal. Still, its unreliable search feature and inability to provide proper context menu options for all file types have pushed it into last place.
Dolphin and GnomeFiles were fairly evenly matched in all tests, except desktop integration where Dolphin outshines the others out of the box. But once you install a few GnomeFiles extensions, you’ll get all the same functionality offered by Dolphin.
In addition, the undo/redo feature of GnomeFiles is of limited use because it only remembers the last operation, unlike Dolphin, which remembers all operations for the currently open window. Hopefully, the developers will work on this feature and adopt a more Dolphin- esque approach to undo/ redo operations. Although GnomeFiles doesn’t enable users to add tags, the implementation on Dolphin seems to be of limited utility, since it doesn’t permit the use of tags as a search criteria.
The most important factor in deciding the winner of this Roundup was the search feature. GnomeFiles wins the top slot because of the speed with which it churns out matches for the search terms.
“Not only does XFE lack plugins or extensions, it also doesn’t support any network protocols”