Dolphin (KDE)

With Dolphin, managing files becomes really easy.

Where Konqueror was confusing at times, Dolphin just works, and I am sure it will work very well for less computer-savvy people, too (different from Konqueror).

For me, Dolphin brought back some of the great usability I lost when I switched from MacOSX to GNU/Linux about 4 years ago.

It showed me the real strength of konqueror, because Dolphin is mostly a GUI set on top of the already existing konqueror codebase. Konqueror has a great backend, and all it needed to become a very easy to use filemanager was a dedicated filemanaging GUI, where the developers could really focus on one task.

Still both share the backend code and show how much can be archieved by using free software tools/libraries as base.

From the description, "Dolphin is not intended to be a competitor to Konqueror" and "This approach allows to optimize the user interface for the task of file management." As anyone who has been along for the ride on KUbuntu in recent months can tell you, Dolphin is very much a competitor to Konqueror. Granted it is not trying to view as many things as Konqueror does but it does compete in the matter of file management.

In this competition Dolphin comes up far short of it's bigger brother. Apparently "optimize the user interface" means "pare down the interface, sacrificing features for simplicity". Simply put, compared to Konqueror's file management potion Dolphin is feature incomplete. It is restrictive in how it presents its information and is overall has a constrained feel to those who are used to Konqueror's advanced file management feature set.

While I applaud the effort and the focus I dislike the end result nor the apparent push within the KDE development team to have Dolphin's limited capabilities replace Konqueror's as the default KDE file manager.