I’ve been running Manjaro with “Mate” desktop (a fork of Gnome2) since 1/1/2022, and I mostly like it, but I dislike its file manager, Caja. I’ve set Dolphin as my “default file manager”, but the desktop manager is still Caja. I removed “caja --force-desktop” from startup and put “dolphin --daemon” in there instead, hoping the OS would take the hint and elect Dolphin as “Desktop Manager”, but nope, desktop is offline. Is there a way to change “Desktop Manager” from Caja to Dolphin in Manjaro-Mate?
https://askubuntu.com/questions/1043494/can-not-change-default-file-manager-of-ubuntu-mate-18-04
Read this may help you. Caja is fine to me …
I’m pretty sure Dolphin doesn’t have such functionality because on Plasma the shell is responsible of drawing desktop icons and not the file manager.
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I was asking about “desktop manager” functionality (desktop icons, desktop right-click menus, etc), not “file manager” functionality (GUI point-and-click access to directories using “file folder” visuals). I can (and do) use Dolphin in Mate, just not as Desktop Manager (I’m not sure if that’s even possible, but I’d like to do that if it is).
Well, that would explain why Dolphin has no “–force-desktop” option as Caja does.
And, essentially, that means that the answer to my question is “You can’t do that, so stop trying.”. Sigh. :-/ Well, it is what it is.
Ok, I installed Plasma, and wow, is it a different environment from Mate! On the plus side, it’s much more configurable. But on the minus side, it’s much more configurable. (Cuts both ways: more things can be tweaked, but the the mountain of available settings is slower to wade through.)
I find that when I log-in, I’m now given two options: Mate or Plasma. Both work. I’m finding I like plasma somewhat better than Mate anyway (in part because I prefer Dolphin’s ability to turn-off the “natural” (ie, unnatural) sort in favor of alphabetic sort), so that may be my ultimate solution. There’s a few bugs doubtless from left-over bits of Mate showing up in Plasma, such as dual Blue-Tooth icons in my taskbar, and an error message pops up in one of the settings, but I can always track those down later, they’re not show-stoppers.
I must say, that between the latest Gnome and Plasma, I much prefer Plasma. I tried installing Gnome on a spare notebook a few weeks ago, and I found its interface infuriating. Whereas, Plasma, I like. But I digress.
Anyway, thanks for the technical details on Caja, Dolphin, Plasma, and desktops. They’ve convinced me that I should just use Plasma as my main DE instead of trying to make Mate something it isn’t.
Not once you get use to it. I install the OS, do what updates might be out there, launch Dolphin configure how I like it, launch System Settings and go straight down the line setting everything up as I like. Between Dolphin and System Setting it takes me less than 10 minutes.
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