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I love the simplicity of Lubuntu, but I decided I wanted a more powerful file manager.

I installed Dolphin and, although I was happy with lxterminal, I had to install konsole in order to get the advantages of terminal integration in dolphin (I tried for a while to get dolphin to use lxterminal, but that wasn't happening for me !).

Now I would like to get Lubuntu to use konsole everywhere, instead of pcmanfm, so I can get rid of it.

I used Preferences | Default applications for LXSession to change Launching Applications | File Manager to dolphin, and rebooted. That caused me to lose my desktop wallpaper and icons. It does not cause my toolbar icon to launch dolphin. Gratefully my desktop came back when I restored pcmanfm.

I discovered that simply changing the command line in pcmanfm.desktop allows the lubuntu menu and toolbar to use dolphin, however the keyboard shortcut ctrl-alt-d still starts pcmanfm.

So, is there a way to replace pcmanfm more thoroughly (and not lose the desktop), or to get dolphin to use pcmanfm ?

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  • LXDE uses GTK2, dolphin is Qt5 based, so you're not being resource efficient. Modern LXQt (the last five releases of Lubuntu use LXQt, 18.04 was 6 releases ago) is also Qt5 based, so dolphin makes a lot more sense (resource or efficiency wise) in modern Lubuntu than on a GTK(2) based desktop. Likewise konsole is Qt5, lxterminal is GTK2 so you're wasting more resources... If you've lots of RAM this won't matter, but why not consider upgrading to modern Lubuntu that uses LXQt (pcmanfm gets replaced by pcmanfm-qt there b/c of Qt base)
    – guiverc
    Oct 23, 2020 at 0:34
  • You can use other file managers on an LXDE desktop, but as wxl has said; replacing (as in removing it) is a bad idea, as it's removal will also mean the loss of LXDE. You'll still have some GUI functions via GUI, but no panel, no background etc... Modern Lubuntu still uses openbox, but the old ~dead LXDE (GTK2 is ~EOL) having been replaced by LXQt (LXDE devs joined with RazorQt team creating LXQt) .. thunar (from XFCE) maybe more efficient on LXDE than the Qt5 based dolphin; XFCE hadn't completed it's GTK2->GTK3 move until after 18.04
    – guiverc
    Oct 23, 2020 at 0:52

1 Answer 1

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As you discovered, it's easy to swap applications. Unfortunately, you also discovered that it doesn't mean that applications have parity.

With LXDE and LXQt, as odd as this might seem, the file manager is responsible for managing the desktop. Not so with Dolphin, where KDE's Plasma does more of the heavy lifting (and ultimately kind of ties together all the separate pieces of their desktop environment in integrated ways, for better or for worse). So if you use any other file manager, you're going to consider how to deal with the desktop, if that's important to you. Some can still handle it (e.g. Nautilus), some have separate solutions (e.g. XFCE's Thunar has a separate xfdesktop package), and there are some separate packages that can handle it on their own (e.g. idesk).

You may want to try Lubuntu 20.04, which uses LXQt, which is vastly improved over LXDE in terms of functionality. I don't think it will get you the console integration you're looking for (which, in Dolphin, is via KParts, something exclusive to KDE), since it seems like discussion of the subject ultimately decided against it, but it at least uses the same GUI toolkit. LXQt is also way more responsive to bugs and feature requests.

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  • That is wild ! I had no idea the terminal program had something to do with the desktop. I will give up trying to replace pcmanfm. The 2 consoles seem to co-exist without problems, so I suppose I will just keep konsole to support dolphin. I look forward to using 20.04 quite soon now.
    – user1759557
    Oct 22, 2020 at 23:11
  • Just FYI since I'm not sure you noticed: I left a comment here but then realized it would be better to revise the answer with that information so I deleted the comment. There's more discussion about how desktop management is dealt with in general, as well as specifically targeting your question about swapping out Konsole integration in Dolphin with another console.
    – wxl
    Oct 24, 2020 at 0:46

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