Okay, I’m generally on the side if dolphin UI-wise, but when it comes to the topic of lagginess, it has to be said that dolphin, and in fact, almost everything using the kio infrastructure, is the one shitting the bed here. You’d think a bit of multithreading will keep the UI from freezing up whenever the underlying I/O has some minor hiccup (which can absolutely happen in practice with network filesystems or USB sticks in combination with large file transfers), but apparently dolphin can’t do that.
It lags for me whenever I access some filesystem that takes a while to respond. That could be a faulty or old device, or it could be an NFS share with multiple large file transfers going on in the background.
And when I say it lags, I don’t mean it just takes a while to show me a directory’s content, I mean the entire UI freezes and kwin will grey out the window because tha application isn’t responding any more.
This does not happen a lot, and if your file browsing is largely limited to a fast local storage, like a SATA SSD or even an NVMe, you may well never see this problem at all. But it does happen.
Admittedly I use an NVMe drive but I’ve never had this happen once in the years I’ve been using KDE. Dolphin is so much snappier than Windows Explorer on the same hardware that it’s almost funny.
But… Why? It’s just a mediocre and laggy copy of Dolphin.
Okay, I’m generally on the side if dolphin UI-wise, but when it comes to the topic of lagginess, it has to be said that dolphin, and in fact, almost everything using the kio infrastructure, is the one shitting the bed here. You’d think a bit of multithreading will keep the UI from freezing up whenever the underlying I/O has some minor hiccup (which can absolutely happen in practice with network filesystems or USB sticks in combination with large file transfers), but apparently dolphin can’t do that.
Dolphin doesn’t lag for me
It lags for me whenever I access some filesystem that takes a while to respond. That could be a faulty or old device, or it could be an NFS share with multiple large file transfers going on in the background.
And when I say it lags, I don’t mean it just takes a while to show me a directory’s content, I mean the entire UI freezes and kwin will grey out the window because tha application isn’t responding any more.
This does not happen a lot, and if your file browsing is largely limited to a fast local storage, like a SATA SSD or even an NVMe, you may well never see this problem at all. But it does happen.
Admittedly I use an NVMe drive but I’ve never had this happen once in the years I’ve been using KDE. Dolphin is so much snappier than Windows Explorer on the same hardware that it’s almost funny.
Yeah, slow network mounts, especially rclone mounts, are typical examples of this.