Dolphin: The Alternative (But Soon to Be Default) File Manager for KDE Linux

Dolphin is an alternate file manager for KDE, which will - in a few short months - become the default KDE file manager, taking over for Konqueror, which has for a few years acted as both a web browser and file manager. While Konqueror will still retain its file managing capabilities (and may, at the user's preference, retain the default status), Dolphin - as a file manager - is what a lot of people have been asking for. Dolphin is small, simple, easy to use, and - compared to Konqueror on a bad day - not cluttered at all. In my view, Dolphin is as good for KDE as Thunar is for xfce and Nautilus is for Gnome. Each file manager is a simple navigational tool that allows a user easy access to his or her files. Sure, there are more complete solutions out there (Midnight Commander is a good example), but for an average user, who is perhaps used to the Finder in Mac OSX, then Dolphin will be an excellent lateral move.

As mentioned, Dolphin is, first of all, a clean, fast file manager. It opens with an icon view of the user's home directory, although that behavior is changable, so if you almost always want to navigate to your Downloads folder, you can set Dolphin to go there first. Compared to Konqueror, Dolphin is much more efficient. In my use, Konqueror - as a file manager - often wanted to take up as much screen real estate as it did when acting as a web browser. I understand that this is likely because I use Kubuntu, which changes some of the default profiles (how Konqueror looks and behaves as both a file manager and a web browser), but Dolphin is just more to my tastes.