 I make a ton of videos about file managers. It's kind of ridiculous. I have just a little bit of an obsession with Crusader. I know that it's a thing that I'm working on, not really, but I know that as a personality trait, I have a thing for file managers. So what I thought I would do today is make a top five GUI file managers for Linux video because I haven't done that before and honestly, I'm kind of surprised that I haven't. But we're gonna rectify that today. Top five GUI file managers for Linux. Now, before I jump in, I should say that I'm specifically saying GUI. I probably didn't say that in the title. It's YouTube. I gotta do a little bit of clickbait here, but I'm specifically excluding terminal file managers from this list. And that's not because I think that they're bad or unusable or anything like that. I use Ranger all the time. It's just that I'm going to make a future video about the top five terminal file managers and that'll be in the future. So if you're interested in that, make sure you hit the subscribe button. They'll come out in the future. So let's go ahead and jump in to number five on the list. So the fifth best file manager for Linux is Crusader. Now, if you've watched the channel for any amount of time, you'll know that I love Crusader. This is my daily driver. This is the one that I use. And out of all the other ones on the list, this one here has the most features of any of them. It's feature packed. It comes with a ton of dependencies, so much so that it's going to turn a lot of people away, but it does so much. I would go so far as to say that this is the Emacs of file managers. I'm just going to put that out there just for a joke. This thing does just an absolute ton of stuff. It does file synchronization between drives, comparison between drives, comparison between files, so you could do meld in this if you wanted to do something like that. Network attached storage, SSH, everything you can think of, this thing can do. My favorite parts about it is that it remembers your position after you close the damn thing. So all of the tabs and stuff you have open, they come back after a restart. It's fantastic. And the fact that it only has dual pane mode. Like this is the only way it works. Like you get two panes whether you like it or not. I think that's fantastic. So that's Crusader. I could literally spend all day just on this one file manager, but I've put it at number five for a reason because this thing is not for everyone. Like it has a ton of, when I say it has a ton of dependencies, it has a ton of dependencies, like a lot. Like it's a KDE application, so of course it does. So just keep that in mind. And it's so bad that you have to have dependencies to enable things like image preview, things like unpackaging or unzipping things. You have to have different packages for that. You could literally see this thing climbing up into the 40 or 50 dependencies range if you wanna literally feature pack this thing. And that's definitely not for everyone. Not everyone needs all of these features. So that's the reason why it's number five and not number one. Because if this thing could be for everybody it would be number one. Number four on the list is an oldie buddy goodie. This thing here is called Nautilus. And if you're used GNOME, you probably know this by a different name called files. And it's actually pretty good. I will say that out of all the ones on this list this is my least favorite. But I put it on here because it is still a very good very functional file manager. If all you need is a simple file manager Nautilus is probably one of your best options because it does everything you want it to do without a ton of frills. Like if you go into the preferences there's not a lot here. There's just a few things like you can control whether or not you want to double click or single click. You can do a few content menu actions but there's not a ton of stuff here and that's okay. Not everyone needs all the options that Crusader has. The downside to this is that it is a GNOME application. So if you aren't using GNOME or you're using Plasma or something like that this is probably not going to fit in well with your system. It works best on desktop environments that utilize GTK. As you can see I haven't themed any of this so it kind of looks kind of fugly right now but you can, I mean if you've looked on Unix porn for anybody who uses this you can do a lot of stuff in terms of theming it. It's fantastic in that arena and it's very simple which is also very good. So that is Nautilus or files. Number three on the list is Crusader's baby brother and that is Dolphin. Dolphin is the default file manager on Plasma and as you can see my install of it is a little broken. I'm not sure why the icons aren't showing up. That's something I'll have to deal with later. I don't actually use Dolphin so it's not that big of a deal. But if you like the idea of Crusader but you don't want to be confused out of your gourd this one here is a good option for you because it has almost as many features as Crusader does but they're not as in your face. It starts out just out of the box as a plain old file manager and then if you want to you can customize it and extend it as much as you want. So you can add things like Dolphin. It will remember your position which is really nice. It obviously comes with all the search functionality and favorites and stuff like that that is traditional in all file managers and it works really well if you use Plasma. So if you are a Plasma user or a desktop environment that uses QT this is probably going to be your best option simply because this is written in QT and it is easy to theme using Covantum or the KDE theme manager, whatever hell it's called. So that is Dolphin. It's really good if Crusader didn't exist this would be the one that I'd be using. I will say that if you are in a Tiling Window Manager Dolphin doesn't work as well as the rest of these on the list. For whatever reason, as you can see this doesn't really like Tiling Window Managers. I don't know why there's just something about it that they don't mesh all that well. So it works best in a desktop environment not a Window Manager. So moving on to number two. Number two is Thunar. Now Thunar is the default file manager for XFCE and it is fantastic, it's really, really good. It does have some flaws that prevent it from being something that I would enjoy. So for example, it doesn't remember your position when you close the application and you reopen it and it just defaults back to the home directory. Not a big deal for most people but for me it's a big deal. I will say that I don't prefer the places panel on the side, but you can replace that with a tree if you want to. And it's actually really functional for a file manager. It has dual pane, it has a few settings. So if we go up here to edit and show you the preferences it has more settings and preferences than Nautilus does but it doesn't have so many that it is going to confuse you or overwhelm you in any way. So pretty much anything you'd want to do with a file manager is perfectly doable in Thunar. It is also very snappy. So one of the things that's a problem with Nautilus or something that is it can be slow. It's not always slow, but it can be slow. I don't have any of those problems with Thunar. Thunar is fantastic in terms of speediness. It also works well no matter what you're using it in. So if you're using Windows Manager or desktop environment, whatever, it works well. It is a GTK application. So if you are on Plasma, it may not fit in as well as your other QT apps, but Plasma usually does a pretty good job of using GTK stuff. In this case, I haven't seen any problems with it and I don't use a lot of GTK stuff either. So it actually themes fairly well with like LX appearance or whatever. So that is Thunar. It's really good. So moving on to number one. Number one on the list is Nemo. Now Nemo is the default file manager for the Cinnamon desktop. But that doesn't mean that you can't install it at other places. Nemo is a fantastic file manager because it comes with a lot of features that everyone can use without being overwhelming. And it's just a little bit better designed in my opinion than Thunar. I like the design out of the box better than Thunar. Plus there are a few options like you can hide the file menu in Nemo. I don't think you can do that in Thunar. It has dual pane. The only thing it doesn't do is remember your position when it's closed. So that's the reason why I don't use it. But I do like the default pane along the side better than the one in Thunar. You don't have to do a tree in order to get something functional over there. And it does all the traditional stuff a file manager would do. So out of all of them, I think Nemo is like the every man's file manager. It works everywhere. It is fast. It has all the features that you'd want it to have. So if we go into preferences here, you can see that there's quite a few more settings than Thunar even. It does have a plugin system. So if you want to extend it, you can do that. You can customize the toolbar a little bit more than you can in Thunar. It's not as customizable as something like Dolphin or Crusader, but then what is? Other than double commander, there's not a lot of other options out there when it comes to super customizable file managers. This one here is customizable, but not so much that it's going to overwhelm you. So Nemo is number one simply because, like I said, I like the design of it more than Thunar. And it just has always treated me really well. It's like one of those file managers that I have no problem using whatsoever. Like at certain times I've had problems with Thunar not launching for whatever reason. I've also had problems with Thunar where when my external hard drive will spool up, it'll take like multiple minutes to actually load the file browser. I've never had that problem with Nemo. So Nemo has just been always rock solid. And that's really what you want out of a file manager. So those are the top five file managers for Linux, at least in terms of GUI. Now, like I said, I'm going to do a terminal based file manager list listicle video thing in the future. So if you are interested in that, make sure you leave a comment and hit the subscribe button. If you have other GUI file managers that you prefer, you can leave those in the comment section below. I know PCMan FM is very popular amongst my audience. And that's why it was going to be on my list. But again, I couldn't get it to launch, so I don't know what was going on there. If you want to, you can follow me on Twitter, at the Linuxcast, you can follow me on Mastadon or any of my other social media networks. Those links will be in the video description. You can support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash the Linuxcast. I'd like to thank my current patrons, Robert Sid, Devon, Patrick, Fred, Kramer, TriDevil, Antoine, Uncle Blinded, KB, Grif, Slonze, Maiklin, Jaxx, Keefe, Keefe, Andy, Gary, Ross, Mitchell, J-Doug, CarbonData, Jeremy, Sean, Odemarny, Eduardo, Archer, Elliott, Mizlau, Merrick, Kamp, Joshua Lee, Peter, A Crucible Darkman, at Six Primus, PMR Watch One, and Phillip. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time.