I thought it best to start a new thread for this.
I am looking for columns view in file manager.
I have found online that ‘Pantheon’ (from ElementaryOS) can do it, and I’d like to try installing it both on my Gnome environment as well as KDE Plasma.
Instructions I found below, they don’t look right for Fedora, so I wondered if someone could be kind enough to ‘translate’ into Fedora-speak?! 
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:elementary-os/stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install pantheon-files
Pantheon-files doesn’t seem to be available for Fedora. ElementaryOS is an Ubuntu-derived DE, so that’s probably why their installation options are based on that environment.
There are not many other file managers featuring so called miller columns. There is another one simply named fm on the page below but i’m not sure how easy it is to install:
Thanks, bit confused as others have suggested installing it. I really don’t get so much of this linux stuff! How exactly do you determine that “Pantheon-files doesn’t seem to be available for Fedora.” Do you look in Software app, or somewhere else?
I thought I read a post somewhere (Reddit perhaps) about someone installing it on Fedora, I’ll have to look into it again, thanks
It’s called elementary-files on Fedora.
Thanks Joe, so that’s the exact same thing, just different name?
Any idea how to install it in F40 Gnome please?
You can open a terminal and enter this command to install:
$ sudo dnf install elementary-files
It should then popup in the applications menu. Or you can run it directly from the terminal with the command:
$ io.elementary.files
I prefer to use Software app to install stuff.
Out of interest, if doing it via terminal as per your command, how does it know whether you want an RPM or flatpak (from either repo)?
Installing with dnf is going to install rpms from the enabled repositories.
Thanks. What’s your view/preference between RPMs and Flatpaks? Would you favour RPMs over Flatpaks or vice versa?
I lean towards 
rpms for most things. I do use flatpak for steam and telegram.
This is more of a personal preference then a technical one as I do most of my installation/upgrades through dnf in the command line.
If you search through the forum there are several threads discussing the merits of either.
Joey, you know “linux” distribution are a collection of software.
Software needs some libraries to be installed and in the same time those libraries are shared among different software.
So maintainers who create “packages” need to test them against some set of “default libraries”, including the exact version of each library and the software that extract programs from “packages” needs to check that the program has got all the needed libraries installed.
All this merry go round is called “dependencies”, meaning software depends on other software.
RPM is a format for packages.
DNF is one of the package managers, search, install, remove, where install means several operations like “check dependencies”, “extract”, “place files here and there”, “write configuration files”, etc.
This is how “linux” has been working since ever.
Lately some people thought it would be nice to have packages that come with all the needed libraries so you don’t have to worry about “dependencies” and you can separate those software from the system (since nothing is shared).
Those are flatpaks or snaps or appimages.
They are different but the general idea is the same.
Now I wrote the advantages, a flatpak goes everywhere, doesn’t care of what version of Fedora you are running. There are two disadvantages, one is bloat, because each single flatpak comes with its own stuff regardless what is already installed so you get multiple copies of the same files. The other disadvantage is some software may expect to access any part of the system and to find some resource there. Since those packages are meant to be self-contained and sandboxed, so they don’t need to and they should not access the system, sometimes the software doesn’t work as expected.
There is also a philosophical issue. Self contained packages are meant to be distributed from “stores” that are like repositories which are external to the distribution. In other words, there isn’t a maintainer who should be trusted, you must trust who ever places the package in the “store”. Exactly the same as browser extensions.
To illustrate, i have 12 flatpak apps installed and they take up about 7.5GB of diskspace. So this is on average 625MB per app. This is much much more than RPM installations would require, since most of the apps are themselves only about 30-50MB in size. The rest is all duplicate libraries, dependencies, codecs etc. There is an enormous overhead involved when using flatpaks.
I don’t have any flatpak because I don’t see the reason for that from the user’s perspective.
I understand a single “store” can serve any existing distro instead of having maintainers who need to put together “native” packages for each version of each distro. This may save a lot of man power but it is not good for the “final user” because of the said technical consequences but even more for the “philosophical” reason, there aren’t maintainer who ensure the safety and the quality of packages.
The fact I can have quicker updates via flatpaks is nice but, again, it is a double edge blade. I can give for granted Mozilla distributes safe flatpaks but that is the exception, not the rule. The rule is I don’t even know who publishes stuff in the “store” and there isn’t nothing between me and her/him.
Regarding “atomic” distros, even worse.
Flatpaks are mandatory AND I have an hard time when/if I need to make changes where ever outside my /home. What do I gain from it? I can rollback in case an update breaks the system, which never happened to me. In my mind this is a tradeoff that makes sense only in some situations, it is not “general purpose”.
There is unfortunately an increasing number of apps that are available as flatpak but not as rpm, or where the rpm version is one or more major releases behind the flatpak version.
Added dnf, workstation
Yes, dnf installs rpms, flatpak installs flatpaks
But the repos are all the same. On flatpak you have a maintainer that may also be the upstream developer, unlike on distro repos.
There always is a maintainer, the packages work the same.
Just that flatpaks have more runtimes and dependencies are separate.
Filemanagers in general could be used as flatpaks, but in my experience not even KDE Dolphin and GNOME nautilus are ready for that.
So for now, using them as RPMs makes the most sense I guess
Sandboxing. Being able to instantly wipe an app’s data. Also, while having multiple flatpak runtimes can use painful amounts of storage, flatpak updates tend to be significantly smaller and quicker than traditional packages, since only changed files are downloaded.
I have doubts about how effective that is, but in any case this applies to Flathub, not flatpak in general (eg Fedora Flatpaks are repackaged from official fedora rpms as I understand it).
Flathub isn’t perfect, but imo even unverified apps aren’t as bad as some make them out to be. It’s not like you have to decompile multi-gigabyte files to check for their safety - a quick look at the manifest is pretty much all you need, and if it’s only downloading stuff from the official upstream site, you’re good to go. Well, maybe check the .desktop file too to make sure all it does is open the app.
And of course, if upstream is the problem (such as the XZ backdoor), then all packaging systems are affected. But at least, in some cases, flatpak’s sandboxing will limit the damage.
Again, we must agree about the meaning of words.
I can be a “maintainer” of “apps” in a “app store”, all I have to do is to register as one.
Since there isn’t any identity check and even less personal trust, the consequence is somebody else must validate the code I publish in the “store”, through some “staging”, otherwise we know soon or later bad surprises will come.
If i am not mistaken traditionally “linux” maintaners have been people who gained trust among their peer, well known people, so basically they aren’t supervised.
Plus, if this chain of trust is broken and a repository is compromised, only one distribution is affected, while the “app store” serves everybody.
About the developer being also the “maintainer”, this is another issue, becuse we assume the guy in the “store” is whoever he says to be and because there isn’t anybody else between him and “final users”. So whatever goes in the “store” goes around.
Since like most people I have been using Windows for some time, please don’t tell me about “sandboxing” when we speak about something that installs itself. I guess it is less of a problem when the system is read-only but even then…
The other reasons are either a double edge, where you save something and lose something else or they are good only because it takes way less man power to make a single package than to re-package again and again for all the versions of all the distros but this is not an advantage for the “user”.
I found time to install Files from Elementary OS and play with it a bit. The columns implementation is pretty good. However I notice I can’t view any files (no thumbnails, no preview, can only open it with default app). Before I uninstall and just make do with default Files app, is this correct or should I be able to see thumbnails etc?
(PS I can’t see any ‘settings’ or ‘preferences’ for the app, so there’s no options to play with)