The ones that have bugged me today: It randomly forgets view preferences. There is something weird about SMB shares where they appear mounted but actually aren’t. It doesn’t have scroll bars in its default state.

MacOS is my favourite by a mile, but there are some major warts, though the finder isn’t my major gripe.

The scrollbar thing is system-wide, not Finder-specific: it’s definitely a somewhat annoying default.

Well, concerning SMB shares I had the same problem in Nautilus a few days ago.

Not having used Nautilus, there's a bunch of bad things about the Finder I can complain about.

The tabs. First of all, they're Safari-style tabs and Safari has awful tabs. And then there's a preference called "open folders in new tabs instead of windows". Open up a Finder window, open Terminal and run `open /path/to/directory`. What happens? Directory opens in a new Finder window.

There's no way to have Finder remember what size a window should be. There's a bunch of tricks that people post online of how you can have Finder remember a window size but they don't work. It might register it on a folder-level but then you run `open /path/to/directory` and it opens up a postage stamp sized window (even though it should open a tab).

And where the hell is cut and paste?

It's honestly surprising how absolutely horrible it is after years and the new Big Sur only have it a fresh coat of paint without fixing any of these issues

Cut & paste is Copy followed by Option-Paste: Cmd-C, nav to destination, Opt-Cmd-V

But that's not cut and paste. That's copy and special paste. And I don't want to start training my brain to use a different set of keys to do the exact same thing that I can do elsewhere just because Apple thinks I should.

Yeah, I am wondering about that too. Finder can rename multiple files and has a goto folder option. Edit: I couldn't find a goto option in Nautilus. I don't know how I missed batch rename in Nautilus... Still, if Nautilus has any advanced features, they're well hidden.

I agree, I’ve always found the Finder extremely usable, especially once you’ve taken a couple minutes to browse the menus and learn the Keyboard Shortcuts.

One interesting thing I’ve noticed is that people don’t seem to bother to look at the menus anymore: one of the first things I’ve always done with a new application (ever since Windows 3.1 on a Pentium 90) is open the menus and skim the menu items to figure out the basic functionality available.

The feature I miss most on Linux is hitting space to get a preview of any file.

Nautilus has sushi. It's not as good as Preview in MacOS but at least works similarily.

You mean Quick Look? Preview is the image viewer / PDF reader.

Preview is a gem on macOS, it's probably what I miss most when I use Windows.

Selecting multiple files and pressing F2 or "Rename Files…" under the context menu is about as intuitive for renaming multiple files as I can possibly imagine.

You're right. I don't know how I missed that. Maybe it was dolphin or some other file manager...

Yeah, typing a folder's address could be a bit more discoverable in Nautilus. You can press Ctrl+L (like a web browser), or just start typing a folder address that begins with / or ~ but you're right there's no visible clickable button.

My experience is the other way round: it took me several minutes and much frustration to find a way to type a folder address in Finder.

Yes! Thank you, that was the shortcut I was looking for. It isn't in the shortcut help.

UI. Add a shortcut to a folder. Go there. Now try to go to parent folder...

Open a folder with images. How on earth do you switch to visible thumbnails?

And more like that.

These things should be intuitive and easy to do.

Unless I’m completely misunderstanding you, showing Thumbnails has an obvious button on the toolbar. Go to parent is harder, but I think for the sequence you describe there’s a back button on the toolbar that will do what you want. Otherwise, you can use the breadcrumb bar at the bottom (can’t remember if this is a default setting or not) or open the Go menu and learn that Command-Up is the shortcut for “parent directory”. (A little later you discover this is symmetrical: Command-Up goes “up” out of the folder you’re looking at, Command-Down goes “down” into the selected item.)

>Open a folder with images. How on earth do you switch to visible thumbnails?

It's really easy, or am I misunderstanding you? View -> as Icons. It even has a keyboard shortcut. Or press space bar while with the file selected.

To go to the parent, command click on the title in the title bar of the window. I don’t know how you’d ever guess that, but I remember it back from the Mac OS 9 days.

The only thing I can think of is that Finder doesn't support SFTP out of the box.

It's a bit embarrassing that Apple doesn't support an entry-level feature like that, but otherwise Finder has been steadily improving for the past few years.

Both Finder nad Nautilus are bad. It's like using Explorer (not IE) in Windows.

CLI makes it better and if more graphical view is required then Midnight Commander on Linux/Mac or Total Commander on windows.

More about finder - why it doesn't show the whole path? It is like it was intentionally made not to trouble people with filesystems.