Why do file managers seem to get dumber and dumber?

Excuse this post gets probably a bit ranty... but I just can't stand it any more.

The issue is that years ago, in the Ubuntu Netbook age, I started using Gnome because it was efficient and also had a calm and minimalistic UI which I liked. Still, most of the time, I use the shell to organize files (I learned TeX in an age where pine was an UI standard and you had to ask the department for permission to use the only laser printer if you wanted to see anything graphical).

Well gnome mostly works for me. But once in a while, I open a file manager. And I am more and more appalled how limited and unergonomic they are. All of them it seems. They support bookmarks, but only a few. They should support a few hundred bookmarks organizing them in a damn fast ergonomic system. They fail at the most essential things. They do not support deleting a file, like in "rm". I don't want a damn trash bin if I have decided to delete that crappy archive.They do not support hard links (You know Windows's Link shell extension? That supports "cp -al"). They do not show file and groups let alone ACLs and sticky bits. They usually do not support version control (you know TortoiseHG or git-gui?). I can only dream of support for SELinux.

They do not support examining a download whether it is kosher. They are all way to eager to open stuff that probably should not be trusted (hey, I want a "mark as trusted" option before anything is opened). I want an option saying "keep this but delete it in a week".

The general tendency seems to be to dumb stuff down to make it "user-friendly" in the worst possible way. Hear, it isn't friendly to treat people as dumb. [added: I spent some time looking for alternatives and trying out a few, but didn't find one that was really convincing. Some are pretty unusual. Maybe this is a reasonable place to invest time in learning unusual but more powerful concepts like Emacs for text editing?]

Well it's off my chest. Are there better alternatives?

Edit: Two things:

1. I do not want to belittle those developers who work hard to make Linux more accessible for people who are not that computer-literate. I think this is important too. What I am wondering is rather why there appears a dichotomy between "easy" and "powerful" user interfaces.

2. I think that for "power-users", the text-based alternatives have some merit. And among those I could look quickly, I think ranger is unusual but quite appealing because it is very open to combine and interact with other console tools.

submitted by /u/BlackSalamandra to /r/linux
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