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About a year ago "Files" and "File Manager" started to act very strangely and all my files were lost, despite an extensive search. Two days later I lost all my data and files from my SATA hard-drive. Luckily I had a backup, but "Files" continued to lose everything every time I put removable media into the USB slots.

Frustrated with "Files" and "File manager" I installed "Thunar" which was an instant success. However "Files" is still set as the default manager for removable media and Rubbish Bin.

Today "Files" moved the contents of my terrabyte SATA drive into the Rubbish Bin and changed the permissions, which prevented me from restoring the contents back onto the drive with "Thunar". In the end I had to copy the folders onto my desktop, rename them and put them back that way.

I want to remove "Files" and "File Manager" but they cannot be un-installed in either "Software Centre" or the Dashboard. I cannot make "Thunar" open the removable media or the rubbish bin as "Files" must be the default for these operations. Is there any way of using terminal to remove these apps as they seem to be standard as part of the Ubuntu package

TallChuck
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user355507
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    "I want to remove "Files" and "File Manager" but they cannot be un-installed in either "Software Centre"". You can through command line but it is unlikely that that is your problem. Nautulis in itself does nothing. Unless you have dubious scripts running I'd assume something else is goign on. – Rinzwind Jun 04 '16 at 22:27
  • I flagged this as duplicate, but I'm not sure the solution will fix your underlying issue. Nautilus shouldn't behave the way you're describing, so maybe there is something else going on - maybe malware. – wjandrea Jun 04 '16 at 22:32
  • I also suspected an underlying issue and have since removed 14.04 and re-installed it. This solved the issue but I prefer Thunar now and installed it and used the suggestion b from @Mina Michael which worked brilliantly. – user355507 Oct 12 '16 at 10:46

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Generally files is just nautilus so if you want to remove it maybe you have to execute

sudo apt-get purge --auto-remove nautilus

but I have a bad feeling about it. Nautilus is deeply integrated within ubuntu.

Anyway I found a community help wiki that has methods to set Thunar as default file manager. There's a script method and there's a manual method.

The script method should be easier however there's a disclaimer written before it. (I don't think you should worry)

To use the script method anyway make a text file in your home folder and name it defaultthunar then copy this script and paste it inside the text file.

Then run those two commands:

chmod +x defaultthunar
./defaultthunar

That's it. If you want to restore back nautilus run ./defaultthunar in terminal (which just runs the script again).

Alternatively you can do the manual method if you want.

842Mono
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  • I suspected an underlying issue and removed 14.04 and re-installed it. This solved the issue but I prefer Thunar now and installed it and used the suggestion you made. No issues since. – user355507 Oct 12 '16 at 10:49
  • okay gr8! then click the "tick" mark that's to the left of this answer ;) @user355507 – 842Mono Oct 12 '16 at 15:51
  • Also if I may leave a suggestion PCManFM is my favorite files manager, I recommend giving it a try – VinGarcia Apr 15 '20 at 12:27