Using Nautilus as Default File Manager

Due to file management is complicated thing, it's very important to select a file manager which is easy to use. Under Linux, there are many applications to provide a user interface to work with file system, Nautilus, Konqueror, PCManFM, Thunar etc. Perhaps the one you're now using as well as you love it so much.

To be a slim distribution, every components we selected were lightweight and fast, so file manager of the original proposal of Mandice is PCManFM(PCMan File Manager). PCManFM is extremely fast and standard file manager in LXDE(Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment), also it's intended to follow the specifications given by Freedesktop.org. However, slim is not the only consideration for Mandice, how to improve user experience is more important than size issue, so there are some factors we have to let us to consider to replace PCManFM. For instance, PCManFM doesn't support some functionalities like SMBFS(Windows Shere File System), easy way to burning CD/DVD and such.

Nautilus is very powerful and usable, and also it is a standard file manager in GNOME. It supports CD/DVD burning, file share, and more great extensions. Considering Nautilus has been used for a long time cause Linux users get used to it, it should be much better and easy to use for general users. For this reason, we've decided to use Nautilus instead of PCManFM.

Using Nautilus to replace PCManFM will increase disk space usage by 28MB, but we guess it will consume 28MB more RAM than PCManFM. :-(