# Dolphin file manager

77 Hacker News commenters recommended Dolphin file manager and 19 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 12 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Free, fast file manager that handles remote shares and huge folders natively; people prefer it to Windows Explorer. Caveat: critics say it's slow with big folders and bloated.

## Why people recommend it

- Better than Windows Explorer (3 comments): "responds as quickly as one would expect File Explorer to respond if it were developed by sane people" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46743457)) "Dolphin blows away explorer, window management is more slick and more flexible out of the box" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46741938)) "Dolphin from KDE would be a much better comparison for Windows Explorer." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46103976))
- Consistent high-quality development (3 comments): "The kind of polish they put into absolutely everything, including these announcements, is incredible." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48671833)) "They've been consistently high quality for the 12 years they've been put out at this point." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47354130)) "the Dolphin team does amazing quality archival quality code and documentation for free" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47042118))
- Built-in sftp, ftp and Samba (2 comments): "Dolphin just handles everything (sftp, ftp, samba, etc) for me natively in the same window." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47769998)) "Dolphin just handles everything (sftp, ftp, samba, etc) for me natively in the same window" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47769326))

## What people warn about

- Slow with big folders and previews (3 comments): "So in other words, dolphin, like every other graphical file manager, is slow as fuck working with directories with lots of files" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47791421)) "you'd watch your disk spin and your ram usage shoot up while it previews all the image files" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47779860)) "waited almost an entire second, if you're lucky, for dolphin to start" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47781881))
- Bloated and cluttered feature set (2 comments): "remove 90% of the features from dolphin you're in the vicinity of the mess they are" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46712259)) "I'm sure it's just as bloated as the other ten thousand bloated file managers." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47783057))
- Odd layout and frustrating behaviors (3 comments): "Dolphin is one of the things about KDE that bothers me, due to the way its windows are laid out and how they use margins/spacing." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45999247)) "I find KDE's Dolphin similarly frustrating - for very similar reasons." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49589870)) "Dolphin file manager has quite a lot weird/inconvenient behaviors" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50112320))
- WebDAV and SMB bugs (2 comments): "WebDAV has been partially working/broken in Dolphin/kio since Plasma 5 on KDE." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46536638)) "ffmpegthumbnailer loops lagged out whole system, SMB bugs" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47334393))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Nemo file manager](https://hackerapproved.com/p/nemo-file-manager.md): 7 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Dolphin file manager", https://hackerapproved.com/p/dolphin/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).