Scottish Martial Arts wrote on Jul 17, 2012, 18:45:
It's an aesthetic call so we'll have to agree to disagree. Ubuntu's implementation of Gnome isn't the only desktop environment in the world of Linux however, and before you dismiss a monolithic Linux as being ugly and difficult to use, you might want to examine some of the other distros and desktop environments. Maybe KDE is the desktop environment you've always dreamed of but never knew to try.

Scottish Martial Arts wrote on Jul 17, 2012, 18:45:
Not in the Unix CLI. Between regular expressions, recursive copying, and filepath completion, you can accomplish very complex file management tasks quickly, easily and efficiently. Toss in some aliases, and scripting functionality, and GUI file managers look downright primitive in comparison.

Trashy wrote on Jul 17, 2012, 18:48:
Not necessarily true, for example if you only need to copy specific file names or a specific type.

say you have 300 files of varying file types in a folder, you only need to copy the PDF files that start with bill_

you can copy them to a folder with this quick command

cp bill_*pdf /home/username/blah/

or you can spend 2 to 5 minutes arranging your file explorer to show what you want to see and then ctrl or shift click your way to select all the files you want.