Dolphin

Raised as a usability problem by 18 people on Hacker News over 10 years (2017–2026), in 16 threads.

People raised many different problems with Dolphin, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 18 complaints

Forced animations make every action needlessly slow, so the user must patch it2026-05-03
File manager lags noticeably when opening folders with many files2026-04-15
Controllers disconnect and won't reconnect to their previous slot, requiring constant manual reordering2025-12-29
A setting to change file sorting behavior is buried among many configuration options2025-09-29
Right-clicking multiple selected files stalls with no clear reason shown2024-07-05
Dolphin's labels become unreadable with dark theme settings, black text on dark grey2024-06-03
Asks to confirm saving twice every time when editing a networked file2024-02-29
Information panel switches focus with mouse movement, unwanted when focus-follows-mouse is off2023-03-18
Freezes and locks up over slow connections with no visual feedback2023-01-16
Sorts symlinks by target file dates, with no apparent way to change it2023-01-15
Folder with thousands of files takes about four seconds to open2022-09-30
Quick-access panel sizing gets weird after window resizing or display switching2021-04-30
Drag-to-copy behaviour differs from other desktops, so the user has to hold Shift to move2021-04-29
Can only select a file by clicking its label, not the whole row2021-01-11
Other apps like VLC don't recognise Dolphin's share authentication, must embed username in URI2021-01-02
Files with shorter names are harder to click because the clickable area shrinks to the label2020-12-02
Default file manager is almost unusable due to maintainers' UX decisions2020-07-13
Interface has warts and the app can be unstable2017-06-07