위대한 리눅스 파일 선택기의 비극

File pickers on Linux are.. not good. Pretty much all of them have a few shortcomings that makes the experience fairly deplorable But, first of all, what is a file picker? A file picker is the window that open whenever you press "Save As" or "Open" on most softwares. To try it out, press the following buttons (the save button saves the html of the current page, nothing harmful) There's usually only minors differences between the two, oftentimes the only change is the input field for the name of the item being saved but as we'll see, every desktop environnement has its own take on what a file picker should have for features. Let's look at it together! (If the save button doesn't work, you can try pressing CTRL+S or using the "Save as" option in your browser) The GNOME file picker Right now, if you're using Gnome or any other DE that doesn't have its own file picker and try to save this page, you'll see something that looks like this: This is the default GTK file picker, all applications using GTK (which is a lot) use it. It works nicely but.. It's extremely impractical compared to its alternatives Gnome has finally added thumbnails to its file picker! You can now ignore all the backhanded comments about it not having thumbnails. The elephant in the room is obviously that it doesn't have thumbnails, an issue discussed many times since the original bug posted in.. 2004.. yet still unsolved. This makes it really hard to use for anything related to pictures and videos - a common usage since jpeg were invented around 1992 Outside of that specific thing, It has a lot of issues and bugs that makes it really annoying to use, a quick list: - You can't create a new folder from the right click menu - It doesn't seem to remember its settings half the time so you need to press right click then "view hidden files" everytime - It cannot open URLs, this is especially annoying when wanting to set for instance, your Discord avatar using an URL. You have to download the file manually and stuff while Windows will just accept it (automatically downloading the picture to its temp folder) - The navigation buttons and the "url bar" are separated, this uses up a lot of space where they could be merged like they are on Windows. The file name could be at the bottom, like it is on other file saving dialogs, especially considering there's a lot of empty space there - Huge performance issues in large folders (which also lead to usability issues due to the cursor often jumping around) - Weird behaviour when searching for files Anyway, I've already moved on from my griefs regarding the GNOME file picker. After all, I've been using it (suffering from it) for the past 10 years or so at this point. The KDE file picker Luckily, this is Linux so we can change stuff we dislike with stuff we don't dislike as much. In this case: the KDE file picker Frankly, it's much much better than the GNOME one these days, first it has thumbnails (which already means it's much better) and as is often the case with KDE stuff, it doesn't suffer from as much UX issues as GNOME's projects tend to However it's still has flaws, it cannot open URLs and doesn't really have a search feature outside of those, it has all you would expect from a file picker So it has thumbnails and bookmarks, the "url" bar works like the one on Windows where it works both as navigation and a typing area and it even has syntax coloring in his text preview! It's definitely much better than the GNOME one so, what's the catch? Well, it's KDE. Unless you're already using KDE softwares, you'll have to install a lot of dependencies for it (kdialog doesn't suffice on a non-KDE setup, see the Arch install guide below). KDE also has the tendency to absolutely rampage through your .config folder, creating many config files for softwares you didn't even know the existence of. It's unfortunately really hard to cleanly get specific parts of KDE due to its design Additionally, some softwares just.. don't support it. Chrome and Firefox both does (Chrome does natively, Firefox does through xdg-desktop-portal ) but for instance, Electron apps using a version older than 14 won't use it. Which, unfortunately for computing, means that even on a full KDE setup, you might eventually encounter the GTK file dialog at some point But outside of that, it works, it's really good. Probably among the best choices really. Sure, it suffer from a bit of compatibility issues but so does the other alternatives and in the case of KDE, it's getting better over the years thanks to GtkFileChooserNative Arch Linux guide See Installing the KDE file picker on Arch Linux for a guide on how to install the KDE file picker on Arch The Deepin file Picker Deepin and Wayland are not the biggest friends so I was not able to install this on my normal setup, in general integrating the Deepin file picker in your system is a bit troublesome. Deepin programs tend to not work too well outside of a full Deepin setup. Additionally, much like the K