GNOME’s Nautilus file manager is finally matching the behavior of other file managers like KDE’s Dolphin and Xfce’s Thunar with a keyboard shortcut for copying and pasting files.
This Week in GNOME highlighted a notable albeit one could argue long overdue change for GNOME Files / Nautilus: Ctrl+Insert and Shift+Insert support for copying and pasting files.
What’s better with Thunar?
It’s probably just that I got used to it with XFCE at some point. My main two concerns:
Otherwise, I find Nautilus much more aesthetically pleasing.
Agree that Nautilus is the most beautiful/clean, but almost the least functional. Maybe those two are in fact inversely proportional, eh.
I haven’t used Nautilus in ages, so I can’t say for certain, but Thunar is a more traditional-feeling file manager. It feels more like an older version of the Windows file manager but with tabs, while Nautilus seems more Mac-like.
Can Thunar run under Wayland or nah? (Just curious, I don’t want to actually use it.)
Yes. In fact, almost every XFCE component can ran on Wayland now. At this point, they’re just a few bugs to hash out and figuring out what they’ll actually use for the compositor.
https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/wayland_roadmap
From what it sounds like, there will be a somewhat usable Wayland release in late 2026 alongside X11, and I imagine we’ll get a more polished release in late 2028.
Everything runs under Wayland. That should be your default expectation.
At this point, Wayland is the preferred environment for GTK and Qt apps. Unless the app is exploiting some specific aspect of X11, all GTK (3 and up) and Qt (5 and up) apps work fine under Wayland.
As for other toolkits, FLTK, Electron, and SDL apps run in Wayland too.
And by “preferred”, I mean that these apps (like Thunar) will run natively on Wayland even if Xwayland is available.
There are Wayland only toolkits now but not really any “modern” toolkits that do not support Wayland. When Thunar gets ported to GTK5, it will be Wayland only.
Obviously ancient x11 specific stuff like XCB or Athena, and things built on them like Motif will require Xwayland or Xsatellite. So if you want to run, xv or motif nedit, you need those. This list includes GTK2 as well. But even they work well enough you may not notice. I mean, xeyes won’t track your mouse I guess.
And just in case mentioning xeyes brings out the Wayland critics, you can build an xeyes app that works in Wayland. I think the Wayland Maker compositor project has one for example (WindowMaker in Wayland).
Well yeah… I was kind of asking whether Thunar is one of those things that haven’t transitioned to a Wayland-enabled framework. Maybe it’s still using GTK3 or something.
Btw, is GTK5 in the works?? 😀