A friend of mine was complaining that his Linux desktop feels slow despite having a really fast computer. I don’t use my mouse mitten outside games and web browsing so it doesn’t affect me, but after doing some tests I ended up switching his file browser to Dolphin.
Here’s a video comparing Thunar, Dolphin, Nautilus and Nemo. Do Nemo and Nautilus use the same list view or something? It does feel sluggish opening a directory. The machine is pretty beefy and has a fast SSD, and I got Claude to do some poking around in perf and saw some suspicious 16+ms gaps in there. Or so it said.
Maybe some kind of render loop chain going on? Or maybe each thing that gets added to the list layout causes the UI widths to adjust, given that the music dir (artist names) seems slower than the pictures one (mostly YYYY-MM dirs). Or a bit of each and them compounding.