Is there an inherent reason other than showing the progress? I work with folders that contain thousands of files very often and I can say it's at least an order of magnitude slower with GUI.
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That's a good question! As far as deleting, I suspect part of it is processing to enable 'recycling' and subsequent restoration of files.
As far as copying, the GUI's seem to do a 'simulated' review of the operation, and then report if a file or files of the same name already lives at the destination, and do you want to overwrite it, keep the old one, etc.
The CLI copy and delete just go ahead and do it. A not-quite-thought-through rm -rf * can do a LOT of damage, VERY quickly!
That said, it still seems to take an awfully long time for the GUI file managers to do these operations with large numbers of files.
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Hi @dodo. No comparison, really. The GUI file manager does things like:
- Maintain trash.
- Update/sort new file listing.
- "Peeking" inside all the files to determine filetype.
- Update icons.
- General housekeeping.
A CLI does very little in comparison. Anyone, what'd I miss? 
I usually have PCManFM handy but it's been awhile. It has less overhead than Caja for when you just want faster response.
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In order to broaden my knowledge, can you give some comparison figures? How long in GUI and CLI with what file size?
Thanks for the answers, I get the idea.
@Philippe, I just made a quick benchmark with test set of vggface2 which consist of 500 folders and ~170k files. Total size is 2.3 GB.
Copying takes about 5 minutes with GUI, and deleting takes about 2 minutes (shift+del). With CLI copying takes 6 seconds and deleting takes 1.5 seconds.
The machine is a workstation with 2 TB nvme ssd and 128GB ram.