i too am currently looking for the perfect file manager.
i am currently using
DFM with XFce, which you can
see here, somebody said it was like the OS/2 file manager but i wouldn't know. also i have been using
ROX Filer which looks nicer but isn't as good as DFM.
Chuck's page has some interesting file managers, but most of them are commander clones except the ones already mentioned.
here's a list of likely looking utilities from ibiblio, i saw a much longer list last night when i was downloading some likely candidates for 'best' file manager (only one i got to work was fileshell, which i don't like yet) and if i find that list again, i'll post it here.
in my opinion distros should provide a few alternative file managers and integrate them into Enlightenment, XFce, IceWM, whatever the nonKDE/GNOME choices for desktop are on that system (hmmph, only windowmaker on redhat...)
depending on what system you are using, you might already have xfm installed. it's a bit like dfm, but a lot worse. also, i tried gentoo for a while which is a really nice file manager, but is still a norton commander clone (actually it's a clone of an old amiga file manager, but it's like the other commanders).
and i have a celery 700 which is butt-slow, and konqueror runs fine on it, as does all of kde 3.1 with all the eye candy. however since i dual boot between slack 9 and peanut linux (which has no GNOME or KDE) i can see the merit of not having a shitload of clutter on your drive simply in order to run konqueror. i was looking into installing konqueror in peanut linux, but i realised it would be necessary really to install the whole KDE/Qt package, which would break the record for a stupid diskspace hog of a file manager (especially since dfm takes up about 600k or something).
I did actually start a similar thread at
http://forum.fuckmicrosoft.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=7&t=001307 so let me know if you find a file manager you like.
edit: here we go! here's that longer list on ibiblio that i mentioned.
[ April 24, 2003: Message edited by: Calum: crusader for peace & freedom ]