Dolphin vs Polo

As with any KDE app, Dolphin, allows adding or modifying toolbar buttons and keyboard shortcuts.

Dolphin supports splitting the view in two navigational areas, this way you can navigate two different directories at the same time.

Pressing F4 with any opened folder on a mounted path opens a console within dolphin.

Dolphin is without a doubt the best fully functional and easy to use and multitask with.
Dolphin also has a refresh button which no other File manager has. It's great for tracking a large files transfer; that's what file managers are for - good common sense.

Dolphin follows KDE's philosophy of being extendable and configurable. It can easily be configured and customized through plugins.

Dolphin automatically identifies and mounts external flash drives.

Pictures with or without previews is optional and selectable at the touch of a button.

Unlike all those GTK-based file managers it does not have to rely on external written software for its functionality because KF5 is KDE SOftware and developed alongside.

It starts with last opened folders.

Supports HiDPI displays.

In icons view mode, the space between files gets stretched so that there is never and annoying empty space at the right side of the window.

Polo wants people to get the file manager they want, but it's not awash with granular layout options that take ages to understand. First select whether you want one, two, or four panes, and then select a format for each pane of either List, Icon, Tiled, or Media. That's it, you're done.

File managers in Linux have a nasty propensity for being closely tied to the distribution family from which they arose. Using Polo allows you to have an identical file management experience when shifting between machines from different branches of the Linux tree.

Quickly mount and unmount devices from the sidebar, including support for locking and unlocking LUKS encrypted devices.

Just paste a YouTube URL into a folder and Polo will download the best quality format of it and save it in that folder.

Browse archive files as those they were just another folder, dragging and dropping files in and out of them at will while the backend uses the appropriate tools to manage the archive file itself. Archive creation includes a rich assortment of controls over compression formats and structure.

Rotate, resize, optimize, convert formats, save for the web and many other handy features all right in the context menu.

Mount ISO files to loop devices with just two clicks, or spin them up as a QEMU KVM instance, and for portability there's also an option to write them to USB flash drives using a GUI dialog.

Perform Merge and Split operations on PDF files without needing another file handler all from the context menu. Rotate and Password Protection settings are also expressed there.

Includes its own rclone macros for adding cloud storage access to the list of browsable locations that just works, a welcome relief in the sea of hacks which provide those features elsewhere in Linux. Currently supported: Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Amazon Cloud Drive / Amazon S3, Openstack Swift (Rackspace Cloud Files, Memset Memstore, OVH), Hubic, Backblaze B2, Yandex Disk

Supports up to four panes, plus a tree-style side panel and tabs.

Built-in terminal pop-up.

Debian-based distributions can leverage the apt package management system to keep Polo updated by adding the approved PPA to their apt sources, simplifying installation as well.

Features a file properties side panel to easily assess and modify permissions.