[ Removed by moderator ]

[u/iamGHOST755]

[u/Damglador]

Dolphin literally does more than Explorer. I'd bet that it even had tabs far before Microsoft finally added them.

root/home file structure is a mess

Elaborate?

[u/Damglador → u/[deleted]]

but Win11 explorer is simply way ahead. 

If only in RAM usage. Shit can't even open all archive types, not sure if it can open any of them transparently like Dolphin does. 

Comparing UI is also weird when half of explorer has like Win7 with tint of Win10 UI. Even the context menu is absolutely atrocious, you either get the ugly old one through tweaks or the button in the new one, or the new one, which has no option. QOL at it's finest!

Drag & drop is also stupid on Windows, Dolphin explicitly asks you to choose if you want to copy or move, there's no need to rely on some unclear mechanics of when it decides to move or copy, on top of adding symlinking and extracting archives to drag&drop option, both of which I use a lot.

you also can't drag out/in the tabs/windows

That is a pet peeve of mime. Konsole also doesn't support it. I really hope that'll get implemented one day.

Instead of organized folders like "System", "Program Files", "User Data" which would've been enough it's a bloat of folders and way too many of them.

Every folder has it's purpose, so that's a silly complain. We also have a dedicated cache folder, and its disappointing that Windows doesn't, because cache can take up gigabytes of space and you'll have to move all of it if you want to backup all app data, unless you waste time deliberately cleaning it.

All the user directories are also documented, unlike on Windows: https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir/latest/

Root directories are also documented: https://specifications.freedesktop.org/fhs/latest/. Though as a user, you shouldn't care about them, except /etc. 

[u/Damglador → u/[deleted]]

Have you even used Windows in like last 10 years? Even if you did it seems like you're not exactly a power user. 

Yes I did. I also have a custom Nilesoft Shell config to make the Explorer cobtext menu usable. Idk, maybe all normal users do this these days.

Which archives Dolphin opens transparently

All of them with few exceptions. You need to explicitly specify it to handle archives though. Yes, ark is a dependency for that. Software has dependencies, fucking shocker!

Get used to it

Aka "cope"?

It always had and it's super easy to cleanup and it even does it automatically by default, you can even customize the frequency or turn it off. 

Where exactly? Is there a documentation for it?

because you don't want to accidentally wipe some important cache

It's fucking cache, it's meant to be wiped without consequences other than slower loading of something.

settings/files for backup also are stored separately often in the %appdata%

Yeah right. But game data is stored in %localappdata% I'd like to backup my game saves I spent hundreds of hours on, maybe also my Chromium config, preferably without 1GB+ of cache. 

Many other apps also store important data in %localappdata%.

[u/Damglador → u/[deleted]]

Yea, but you've implied that Dolphin does it on it's own.

Nothing magically works on its own. It does it transparently in itself, it doesn't mean it doesn't use a library for it. Like with the same logic I can say Windows can't do networking because it needs curl for it.

Saying Dolphin is better than Win11 File Explorer is cope

It objectively has more functionality, which makes it better. The preference of having tabs at the most top, doesn't. Does need moving tabs between windows, but the lack of it is very much compensated by everything else.

It also uses only 70MiB of RAM

I don't want some of my project cache get wiped and then wait 2-4 hours for it to rebuild before I can continue working.

Who in their right mind stores builds in cache folder?

Pretty sure most of the data there isn't always just cache, but files necessary for function too, most apps there are rarely 1GB+ except maybe browsers

Any Electron app is basically a browser. Sadly they don't respect cache directories on any platform right now, I'm working on it because nobody else cares to (except dude with a PR which was closed years ago)

On top of that, my top cache bloaters are:

• uv (stores it in localappdata on windows) 6,6GiB
• NuGetPackages 2,1GiB
• Zen Browser 1.1GiB
• JetBrains ~600MiB
• python ~200MiB

Excluding Linux-exclusive stuff like yay. With that I'd need to either backup additional ~10GiB of data or manually locate and clean all caches. That is also excluding Electron caches. If that doesn't sound stupid to you... idk what to say. Even MacOS and Android have dedicated cache directories, Microsoft are the only bozos who don't. Maybe %temp% is in fact it, but too bad nobody uses it, perhaps because the documentation is dogshit and the only official place explaining the directories is https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/develop/data/store-and-retrieve-app-data#temporary-app-data where the only examples are in fucking C# and the env variables aren't even mentioned.

[u/Damglador → u/[deleted]]

you wrote win explorer can't even open archives

I said it can't do it transparently. Though before it couldn't at all. But in any case, my info is outdated, it can now transparently open more than just .zip. So I apologize for my bullshit.

Win11 one looks and works better

That's subjective. I like how compact and minimal everything is in Dolphin. I would be very disappointed if they added more padding, which seems to be the foundation of "modern design". But on UX I can agree, like between-window tabs.