I'm on UM 21.04 and I've installed Nautilus and set it to be the default file manager in Preferred Applications in the Settings, but when I plugin my phone and mount the storage it automatically opens up in Caja! This also happens when I download a file in Firefox and click the Open Containing Folder Icon!
Issuing xdg-mime query default inode/directory returns org.gnome.Nautilus.desktop
Am I missing something?
@aliakbar, this is a bug. And it is not specific to 21.04. Another user had complained similarly but in his case he was trying to set Thunar as his default file manager. If you would like to file a bug please do so otherwise I'll file it in a day.
EDIT: I found a topic where @Wimpy our project leader, replied (cryptic to me). Probably that means to say it cannot be changed (?!). Someone has to confirm.
EDIT: I found a topic where @Wimpy our project leader, replied 1 (cryptic to me). Probably that means to say it cannot be changed (?!). Someone has to confirm.
@saivinob Thanks for the reply! Yeah it seems very likely that this is not a conventional bug but rather a design decision! Which IMHO is unusual in the Linux spirit, denying freedom of choice.
Anyway thanks for you time.
Reminds me of the early Windows shell replacement days (LiteStep anyone?) and people had trouble understanding that Explorer.exe was both file manager and desktop shell. I don't think it's anything restrictive going on, just a deal where it is impractical to separate caja the desktop with the icons and caja the file manager. In Windows one of the things people did during ye olde Windows 98\SE\Me days was patch the three desktop shell files to be able to retain the functionality they needed.
I seem to recall a recent kerfuffle with Solus Budgie because they finally decided to patch out their increasingly old Nautilus which was still providing desktop icons in order to maintain compatibility with Gnome. Their drop in replacement left something to be desired... I imagine this is a similar situation. Caja provides the desktop. It's going to be difficult to try to run something else and keep Caja from wanting to do its thing.
With all the other stuff Wimpy has to do to keep us compatible with GTK3 without breaking the whole Mate Desktop it simply might not be a priority to make it possible to split the functions to allow a different file manager to run and then have to keep maintaining that against changes from a hostile upstream?
If you really, really want to change your file manager completely to Nautilus, you can use the command:
gsettings set org.mate.session.required-components filemanager 'nautilus'
...then log out and log back in.
@gordon, I tried your command for 'Thunar' file manager (but should not matter right?) and the result is not what I wanted/expected.
Caja is essential MATE desktop component. So I think that it is expected, that it is hard to replace it with something different. Moreover Caja is more functional than Nautilus or Thunar. See this screenshot to understand what I mean.
This reminds me topic about Nautilus replacement with Nemo on ordinary Ubuntu. It was almost impossible and non-userfriendly too. IMHO Nautilus and Ubuntu desktop (say GNOME Shell) are degrading very fast, so I'll ignore them.
My idea is to ignore GNOME and Nautilus and continue to use Caja inside MATE. I do not have free time to dig into Nautilus-MATE problem and will not recommend others to dig into it. Our universe is MATE and we should make it spinning and running best.
Brilliant! I applied your solution and now everything opens up in Nautilus. I marked your reply as solution, Thank you!
@Norbert_X I understand people have different tastes and needs, and one size does not fit all! I'm not sure which features of Caja you're referring to, but having more features is not very appealing unless they're implemented in a user-friendly design.
After trying almost all DEs and their File Manager, I'd say Dolphin comes first, then Nautilus and then Caja. Caja's UI is not intuitive to me, toolbar is not customizable and overall it looks very outdated.
Anyway thanks to @gordon I got it working, mods please mark this as solved. Thanks!
Huge thanks man! Fork for me