It seriously can not be the system default for Fedora. It crashes every 5 seconds just navigating to ~/Downloads/. We consider GNOME to be the most stable version of linux, we claim it is BUG-FREE. But instead of distributing a good file manager, we give you… nautilus.
Is there a way to change the xdg default file manager from nautilus to say: pcmanfm? I already map pcmanfm to my usual hotkey, but every app that opens the default file manager has to use nautilus.
You might be hitting a variation of this issue: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/nautilus/-/issues/3657
nautilus has sadly been very crash-prone for me since Fedora 40, and it looks like it’s hard to find the actual cause. 
Its probably nvidia related. Im sure it is, still pcmanfm has never crashed for me. I wish it was easier to actually change the default file manager on GNOME. Very difficult.
Does it have a crash log location?
I’ve never seen Nautilus crash 
(openSUSE TW, Fedora 40-43, Ubuntu 25.10 this month/today, older versions F20s, GNOME 3-40s-49)
If it’s a NVIDIA thing, I suspect it’s GTK’s Vulkan (GSK_RENDERER=cairo globally or with starting nautilus might fix it)
connection
Dec 17 15:29:13 fedora org.gnome.Nautilus[171612]: Source ID 270 was not found when attempting to remove it
Dec 17 16:01:49 fedora org.gnome.Nautilus[177082]: Connecting to org.freedesktop.Tracker3.Miner.Files
Dec 17 16:01:49 fedora org.gnome.Nautilus[177082]: Localsearch search engine has no connection
Dec 17 16:37:46 fedora org.gnome.Nautilus[192003]: Connecting to org.freedesktop.Tracker3.Miner.Files
Dec 17 16:37:46 fedora org.gnome.Nautilus[192003]: Localsearch search engine has no connection
Dec 17 17:09:11 fedora org.gnome.Nautilus[221232]: Connecting to org.freedesktop.Tracker3.Miner.Files
Dec 17 18:30:15 fedora org.gnome.Nautilus[260714]: Connecting to org.freedesktop.Tracker3.Miner.Files
I forgot to mention I uninstalled the miner 
Seriously why does a file manager have to require a miner to function? I think thats partly to blame. But it should function normally without it. Just request the directory and file attributes in real time not using a background process…
printf “[Default Applications]\ninode/directory=pcmanfm.desktop\n” > ~/.local/share/applications/mimeapps.list
this apparently is how you set pcmanfm as your default fm on gnome
sudo dnf remove nautilus localsearch tinysparql tracker3-miners
Hi @treecivilization : I understand your frustration at the crashes, but please do not resort to cursing and shouting on the forum.
Folks are here to help, but they need more information to do that. We need to know how you have modified your system—what packages you have added/removed—and where possible we need some error logs at least—either from the journal, or from running nautilus from the terminal and so on.
To begin with: the tracker (now localsearch) bits form the indexing core of Gnome—that’s how the activities search works, for example. A lot of the gnome apps integrate it, including nautilus, so removing the package will probably result in some breakage. Perhaps, if you are not happy with gnome’s design decisions and the software they include in their environment, it maybe worth looking at a different desktop environment.
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This is not a Gnome thing, it’s a Linux/XDG standard:
Since Fedora 38, my first install, Workstation uses nemo, not nautilus. No idea why but it’s been stable. I hadn’t a clue nautilus was even installed, but it is.
Edit: maybe because I installed cinnamon on top of gnome. Always hated gnome since gnome 1 with the childish icons.
Yeah that might not be a good idea 
I disable it:
gsettings set 'org.freedesktop.Tracker3.Miner.Files' 'enable-monitors' 'false'
gsettings set 'org.freedesktop.Tracker3.Miner.Files' 'crawling-interval' '-2'
gsettings set 'org.freedesktop.Tracker3.Miner.Files' 'index-on-battery' 'false'
gsettings set 'org.freedesktop.Tracker3.Miner.Files' 'index-on-battery-first-time' 'false'
And clear it:
localsearch reset --filesystem
Nautilus has been one of the most stable and reliable apps out there for me, and I use it intensively every day. I’ve seen it crash maybe once or twice per year at most, nowhere near as often as what you are encountering here. Statistically, this has also been the case for most other users, otherwise Nautilus developers would receive a lot more crash reports in the upstream bug tracker, and would also have a much easier time actually encountering your bug themselves and fixing it.
Rants don’t get crashes fixed, deterministically reproducible reports with backtraces and clear instructions do.
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Next step here: please provide a stack trace taken with gdb, following the linked instructions. Then we can at least know why is it crashing, and check if a bug report exists already.
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