Why do people dislike Dolphin?

[Steve Lamb]

Herman Holmström wrote:
> Why is it that so many hates Dolphin?

    Because it is full of fail as a file manager?  I've been meaning to write
this for a while now.  So here goes.  Take a look at the following image, I'll
be referencing it a lot.  Notice that this is with KDE 4.1.2 so it is a fairly
recent version of Dolphin.  However it isn't 8.10 but I doubt much has changed
in the points I'm about to make.

    On the left is Konqueror displaying my home directory in the details view.
  Note the URL display at the top, the Back/Forward/Up buttons and notice that
it doesn't take up very much screen real estate.  All of those are very
important for the following reasons.

1: URL lets me know quickly where I am as well as allow me to quickly access
other areas not only of my local file system but remote file systems through
SMB://, FISH://, FTP:// (etc, etc, etc) links.

2: The Back/Foward buttons aren't entirely needed but the up is because moving
*up* the directory structure is as important as moving down.  Moving down is
simple, click on the folders in the main display.

3: With the small screen footprint I can put two of these on the screen
side-by-side I can quickly copy/move files between two directories with
minimal fuss.

    Now, on the right I present Dolphin in all it's fail.  Note that the
actual display in the middle is a tad larger than the Konqueror window.  I
didn't think to resize them to match until after taking and uploading the
screenshot.  But notice the large wasted space to the left and right.  The
"places" panel is pretty much useless.  Case in point, my Virtual Machine *has
no floppy!*  On the right side we have a big honkin' icon which is just a
replication of the tiny icon in the details view itself.  It also helpfully
tells me information which is already in the detail view.  So that, too is
useless.  Why those are turned on by default is beyond me.  They do nothing
but waste space!

    The next step of fail is... no URL bar.  Great, I'm in HOME.  Yay.  The
path is?  Oh, no idea.  I can enter a new path where?  Oh, I have to pull up a
real location bar to do that.  Compared to Konqueror's view, useless.

    Finally the biggest fail of them all.  The one that shows how flat out
dumb the developers are.  Go ahead, navigate from /home/grey to /home.  Oh,
awwwww, *NO UP ARROW*!  I could configure it and add it in.  I could learn
ALT-UP by looking at the "Go" menu.  I could hit CNTL-L to bring up the URL
bar to type in /home.  I could click on "Root" in the oh-so-useless "places"
panel and navigate back down to /home.  But who in their right mind hides the
second most important navigation option for a filesystem *BY DEFAULT*?!

    FAIL!

    By default Dolphin is larger, less informative, less useful and harder to
use.  It can be wrestled into some semblance of usability but to do so would
mean arm-wresling it to look like... Konqueror!  So why go through all the
trouble when we can just use the sensible and highly usable software in the
first place.

    And that is why Dolphin is hated.  Loathed.  Shunned.  And rightly so.  It
is, in a phrase, a case study on how not to make a file manager.

-- 
         Steve C. Lamb         | But who can decide what they dream
       PGP Key: 1FC01004       |      and dream I do
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