https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=328709

[email protected] changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
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                 CC|                            |[email protected]

--- Comment #10 from [email protected] ---
Any news on this now 11 years ticket for a feature request ?

I miss this feature weekly and frankly I don't understand the mindset of "let's
remove features" in the name of usability. Lacking this feature is a loss of
productivity and time wasted and it's been quite a long time now.

If you are worried that this feature that people would actually use could be
trouble for some other users not knowing better, then this rationale applies to
a number of existing features already in dolphin, for example soft links.

I happen to be dealing with such 'casual' users on a regular basis as I manage
their computer maintenance and provide them support. I can attest that they
experienced various level of hardships and difficulties at least a few times
with the following dolphin features:
- dual panels
- tabs
- view modes
- filter bar
- toolbar configuration menu
- keyboard shortcuts
- keyboard shortcuts menu
- hidden files
- embedded terminal
- the contextual menu
- some of the services in the contextual menu
- drag and drop

This friendly reminder to point out that people will inevitably experience
difficulties with even basic features, dumbing down software will not prevent
this and is a missed opportunity to help those users learn while pushing away
power users. It's really a lose-lose status quo.

Imho a proper way to add an advanced feature to a piece of software is the way
the old presto-based opera did mouse gestures. On installation this feature is
disabled, on first use it would display a message box informing the user that
she just used a mouse gesture, asking her if she is familiar with these and
wants to enable this feature, to learn about this feature or simply cancel and
do nothing.

Enabling would remind that you can later disable it from preferences, close the
box and enable the feature.
Learning would launch a quick tutorial where you learn by doing, following
simple visual instructions on screen and ending with offering to enable or
cancel
Cancel would close the box and do nothing.

Back to dolphin and hardlink, it could be possible to have a preferences toggle
to switch from a default beginner mode to an expert mode. 
The expert mode would include a setting to enable linking (both soft and hard)
from the drag n drop contextual menu, with an optional tutorial explaining what
links are, what the differences between soft and hard are and introduce a
couple use cases.

I wonder why desktop software design is stuck in a dated mind set that user
have to read manuals or assume user already know how to use the software. While
other pieces of software such as video games have evolved to include smart
tutorials where you learn along by using the software, or have a separate
tutorial to learn the controls and the game mechanics by play an introduction
level.

This would answer both user asking for hard link support in dolphin and devs
afraid that including basic unix file management features would confuse and
cause trouble to the computer illiterate users. 

Alternatively if someone has a patch to add this feature to dolphin, or and
existing patched version, I would be happy to instantly ditch the vanilla
dolphin to switch to the customized version without blinking.

In the meantime for those who want an admittedly not so good workaround to this
dolphin shortcoming: you can use krusader instead. It includes the ability to
hard link files, but instead of being easy to access it's inside a nested
submenu of the contextual menu. see screenshot here:
https://i.imgur.com/NsqViMw.jpeg

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