The standard KDE/Qt based filemanager (forgot name) is much quicker even with showing the details. Meaning, Nautilus is just very inefficient as that other filemanager is able to show things much more quickly.

That's KDE Dolphin, has been improved a lot over the last few years.

KDE in general has been in good shape, better than GNOME 3 in my opinion. I've been using GNOME 2 and GNOME 3 (up to 3.8 when they completely got rid of fallback mode) for about 10 years, always felt that Nautilus as a file manager was basic and useless.

I switched back to KDE 4 (AFAIR it was 4.10 at that time), the desktop search and index implementation - NEPOMUK (what a bad name) had big performance issues when doing the inital indexing and when it does periodic indexing the desktop simply choke. It took a while to search for tips and best practices to settle it down. Later on I decided to completely disable that as I don't need it...

Later on KDE switched to a new search and indexing engine called Baloo, it seems that the design is better and configuration is more straightforward but I still cannot justify, disabled ;-)

In short, have been running Linux as my main desktop / workstation OS for 15 years, I come to a conclusion that OOTB (most distros) setup is not ideally optimized and secure for Linux Ninja, it takes time and effort to tune the system to suite your personal standard / taste (Now I run Arch Linux on most of my devices).