Yup, the exact thing OP is complaining about is exactly why I prefer to use Linux.

Right, but this is fundamentally at odds with the 'Linux for everyone', 'Linux for gaming', and 'Linux can replace Windows for most use cases' rhetoric.

If you enjoy Linux for its own sake and you like fiddling around with it and learning its ins and outs, it's fantastic. But if you just want the OS to get out of the way so you can get back to what your were doing, it leaves some room for improvement.

We can't have both, and that's fine. There's also an argument to be made for people getting used to dealing with a command line because it's something of a prerequisite for getting away from increasingly shady corporate overreach. But that doesn't help me when the solution to getting my extra mouse buttons and precision mode is to create a well documented bug report for Solaar and then wait. I just want my push to talk to work, you know?

That gap is definitely shrinking as time goes on, but it's still an obstacle and it'll always be part of the conversation around GNU until it's no longer a concern for one reason or another.

The problem here is not that things work differently, but that GUI programs are often just dumb, or have the functionality but in a very strange way. And I'm not a new Linux user.

You're missing my point. It's not a case of me wanting to do something in the same way that Windows does it, it's a case of the Linux way is massively over complicated for no good reason.

Yes, the terminal is vastly more powerful, but there's no reason at all that you should be forced to use the terminal for something as simple as this.

I read it more as: "The way to do this (normally simple) thing is incredibly cumbersome, and could be greatly improved.

That isn't even a Thunar issue anymore, it was fixed in the last version half a year ago. It's more about stable release distros provide inferior experience yet again.

Yep, and that's very frustrating. I replied to someone else while you were writing this, but the gist of it is, I read somewhere else that it couldn't handle cbrs yet, and did the prep before I checked. I should have done it the other way around, but it's done now :/

dolphin doesn't recognize * but searching for .ext will list all files in all directories with .ext, so you don't need the wildcard.

Thanks for replying :)

I don't want a more Windows like experience, I'm just shocked that something as basic as moving files requires the terminal in Xubuntu. It's just Ubuntu with a different desktop environment, it shouldn't force me to the terminal for basic tasks.

Catfish lets me find the files in the same way as you said Nautilus does in Ubuntu, but it doesn't let me do very much with them. It seems pretty pointless.

I’m sorry to see so many “Don’t expect Linux to work the same way” responses.

Thank you, it is a bit infuriating. There's a definite feel of if you don't like how something works, you're not a part of the clique, and must be a Linux bashing noob.

The reason for moving them was that I use Mylar. It processes comics and should automatically convert them to cbz and move them back to the correct directories. Part of the workflow should be that it tags them and updates the comic info too. I had some files that I'd put in place before turning that option on in Mylar, but it only converts files that it thinks are new, hence the move.

I’d suggest reading the docs though; it supports cbr and cbz.

Somewhere on a forum or another site, I'd read that the cbr support wasn't working properly yet, but didn't think to confirm it before trying to convert the files. I've been burned by comic converters in the past, so wanted to prep everything first. Lesson learned though :)

Yes, shell commands are more powerful, but you shouldn't need to learn a new language to do something as simple as waving hello to someone else.

What's the point of a GUI file manager if it can't handle very basic file operations?

It's the rather snappily named cbz_jpg-to-webp by azuravian and the Github page is here:

https://github.com/azuravian/cbz_jpg-to-webp

I haven't used it at all yet, so I have no idea how well it works. As usual, test it out on a copy of your files first :)

I like your optimism :)

I haven't learned a new skill, I just copied and pasted some commands from a website. As it is, I've been using Xubuntu on this server for a few years, and Mint on my laptop (on my PC now and then too, and permanently once I can get rid of Adobe), and I'm comfortable with the terminal. I grew up using DOS, and could set up gaming boot disks in my sleep. I just think it's silly that to do something as basic as copying files, I had to resort to this. Someone new to Linux coming from Windows is not going to have a clue how to do it, and is likely to go back, all over one of the most basic operations a GUI should be able to do.

Thunar is currently on 4.16.10. I just checked for updates, and Thunar isn't in the list. It may be part of one of the other packages that are available, but I haven't had a chance to check properly yet.

It's good to know that Catfish is being phased out though, I'm not a fan of it.

I agree with a lot of what you say, but when you are handicapped (by lack of knowledge), it's ok to ask for a crutch. Maybe you only need it temporarily, but it's a massive help while you need it.

I've tried switching to Linux several times, but there seems to be a lot of gatekeepers who just say (essentially), "you're doing it wrong!".

I just want my computer to do what I want, without needing to use up hours trying to figure out some quasi-coding terminal command. Maybe I'm not the intended user, or something.

Hah, no I'm not quite that bad :D

Despite the apparent theme here of others assuming that complaining means that I don't know what I'm doing, I've been using Linux on and off since at least Ubuntu 6.something, and have had my server and laptop running Xubuntu and Mint for the last few years.

I didn't say at any point that I want Linux to behave like Windows, I just used Windows as an example of how easy it should be to use a GUI file manager to carry out very basic file operations. Why do people on this community sem to assume that just because I don't like the way that something works that I don't know how to do anything? It's quite condescending.

Secondly that way is stupid even in windows, you’re destroying all of the organisation you had with no possible way of recovering it. How do you plan on putting the comics back into the folders they were on before you moved them all to a single folder?

No, I didn't. My first sentence says that I run Mylar to manage the comics. I moved the files into Mylar's watch folder so that it would pick them up and process them again. Since I added the cbr comics, I've turned on an option in Mylar that automatically converts new comics to cbz. While doing this, it renames them according to the name of the comic series, and adds metadata to the cbz file that is not in the cbr. While I probably could have found another way to do this, I already have Mylar up and running. Why would I make more work for myself when I have an existing tool that does it automatically and to my pre set preferences?

As far as running random code goes, I'd already found several examples of find being used to find files, and mv is a pretty straightforward command. While I could have put the string together myself with a little bit more searching, I tried Chat GPT to see if there was a GUI based way to do it. Not because I don't like to use the terminal, but because I thought I must be missing something. Basic file operations are pretty much the whole point of file managers, so finding out that Thunar and Catfish couldn't perform a basic task was a bit of a shock. It's not a complex task for a GUI, and other OSes, and apparently other file managers according to some of the replies, can do this very easily.

The script you found is the one I will be using, but I haven't done anything with it yet. I was doing what should have been basic maintenance on the files I wanted to convert. I did make a simple mistake, in that I read somewhere else that the script couldn't handle cbr files, and didn't double check before I started getting everything ready.

It was the Catfish documentation that doesn't mention wildcards, and I didn't think that was odd because wildcards are used pretty much everywhere, plus, the documentation didn't cover very much.

The reason Thunar doesn’t bother is that 99.999% of the time when a user searches x what he means is really the regexp .x., so that’s what it does

That's part of the problem. They know that wildcards are so commonplace that they assume that it's what someone means. In itself it's not a major problem, but a message saying something like 'You searched for *.cbr, did you mean to search for .cbr?' might have been more helpful than just a blank results screen.