Well, Windows Explorer is terrible, Dolphin is better but still not really that great, Nautilus is stripped back and barebones, Thunar is ancient and barely competes with what Windows XP had, and vifm is unreasonable unless you exclusively work in terminals. Did I miss any that are even remotely popular?
noxypaws@pawb.social 3 days ago
Dolphin seems great to me! What do you think Finder does better than Dolphin?
Sneptaur@pawb.social 3 days ago
In fairness, Dolphin is definitely the best available on Linux. I think Finder strikes the perfect balance of simplicity and customization. It’s easy to figure out for a newbie and powerful enough for a developer. Dolphin’s learning curve is a bit steeper and in my view it has too many features on offer. This is a common problem with KDE software. It’s not a big deal because KDE stuff isn’t used on commercially-available products that need tech support, and anyone using Linux should be able to get by just fine with it, but I still think Finder is simply better software with a longer history and judicious use of new features
noxypaws@pawb.social 3 days ago
I’m sure there are organizations using Plasma desktop with IT departments supporting it, but I definitely take your point that Apple has orders of magnitude more spending on UI/UX and software development
I’m largely curious about Finder these days since I used macOS almost exclusively from the G4 days right up until about the time they switched to ARM, so it’s been a few years. I’m curious if Apple has made any significant improvements to Finder in the past, say, four years?
Sneptaur@pawb.social 3 days ago
Well, I stopped using macOS for about four years because the 2020 models were just… bad. I am back to using it now because my current employer provided me with a MacBook Pro to use, and I’ve gotten to enjoy the current version of Finder. I think the most notable change in recent years is the addition of tabbed finder windows, and just a ton of really small changes to make things a bit easier, like how they changed the way copying files works to be paused and resumed from the finder itself.
In macOS 15 I’m mostly happy that Microsoft’s window tiling patent expired so we can finally tile windows natively in macOS without needing that bettersnaptool app.