I decided to give PCManFM a whirl after twiddling around with XFE for a while. I'd give both managers a thumbs up, XFE for speed, and PCManFM for (slightly less) speed, being built on gtk2 (yay for matching my others apps), and having more features.

One of PCManFM's features is the ability to display icons on the desktop from the ~/Desktop directory. This is all well and good, but it seems that PCManFM insists on also managing the wallpaper display. Once again, all well and good, but if you're like me and use something like feh to display your background image, this is a tad of a turnoff. It's also a turnoff if you use a WM such as Fluxbox which relies on having the ability to right click the desktop to display a menu for programs.

On the other hand it is extremely responsive. Very fast at loading up, cruising files, etc. Besides, who could argue with tabbed browsing?

Features (that I like):

• Tabbed browsing
• Drag & Drop support
• File association support
• GTK+ 2
• Bookmarks support

If you don't use a WM like Fluxbox (if you use gnome, kde, or something that doesn't heavily rely on right clicking the desktop) and you can stand the fact that you can't re-arrange how the icons are displayed, it's not that big of a deal. In fact, I'd recommend using this over nautilus any day.

Labels: geek, linux, pcmanfm, review