I have CachyOS with Cinnamon. It comes with Nemo as the file manager. Some actions though open a different, mostly featureless, anonymous file manager:
BTW. I get mad at colleagues at work if their stuff has no name and no indication how to contact the owner. This is a bad example. I’d get mad…
A lot of apps have a built-in file manager. That looks like Nautilus. Is this device-wide or from a specific app? Can you isolate it with htop or similar?
Stupid me, typing “file” in the start menu reveals the name: “cutefish”
I wonder why this is on my system. The repo did not see any commit in 4 years. sudo pacman -R cutefish - done.
@dwouu It opens if I click on the file form a firefox download.
Might be worth investigating how it got there.There is no cutefish package in CachyOS, Arch Linux, or the AUR.
There are a bunch of cutefish related packages in the AUR but they’re bundled under cutefish-meta.
I can see it used to be in the AUR. Last Internet Archive snapshot was 2026-01-01.
Edit:
Apologies, in the Arch Extra repository.
Is this possible? I certainly did not install it. I didn’t even know it’s name.
Maybe you can check the pacman.log to see when it was installed and what else was installed at that time?!
here is the log:
~ $ grep -E "cutefish" /var/log/pacman.log
[2025-12-21T14:10:16+0100] [PACMAN] Running 'pacman -Syu cutefish-filemanager'
[2025-12-21T14:10:29+0100] [ALPM] installed cutefish-filemanager (0.8-3.1)
[2026-04-22T17:51:13+0900] [PACMAN] Running 'pacman -R cutefish'
[2026-04-22T17:51:21+0900] [ALPM] removed cutefish-filemanager (0.8-3.1)
If this install command was triggered by me I should see a doctor.
You might see a little more around it with something like;
grep "cutefish" /var/log/pacman.log -n5
Or maybe expand it to everything done in that hour of the day, if it helps to see what you were up to at the time:
grep "2025-12-21T14" /var/log/pacman.log
Here is was happend around the install:
~ $ grep "cutefish" /var/log/pacman.log -n5
1986-[2025-12-21T14:05:12+0100] [ALPM] running 'gdk-pixbuf-query-loaders.hook'...
1987-[2025-12-21T14:05:12+0100] [ALPM] running 'gtk-update-icon-cache.hook'...
1988-[2025-12-21T14:05:13+0100] [ALPM] running 'update-desktop-database.hook'...
1989-[2025-12-21T14:05:13+0100] [ALPM] running 'zz-snap-pac-post.hook'...
1990-[2025-12-21T14:05:13+0100] [ALPM-SCRIPTLET] ==> root: 43
1991:[2025-12-21T14:10:16+0100] [PACMAN] Running 'pacman -Syu cutefish-filemanager'
1992-[2025-12-21T14:10:16+0100] [PACMAN] synchronizing package lists
1993-[2025-12-21T14:10:17+0100] [PACMAN] starting full system upgrade
1994-[2025-12-21T14:10:27+0100] [ALPM] running '05-snap-pac-pre.hook'...
1995-[2025-12-21T14:10:27+0100] [ALPM-SCRIPTLET] ==> root: 44
1996-[2025-12-21T14:10:27+0100] [ALPM] transaction started
--
2035-[2025-12-21T14:10:29+0100] [ALPM] installed kcrash5 (5.116.0-2.1)
2036-[2025-12-21T14:10:29+0100] [ALPM] installed kded5 (5.116.0-2.1)
2037-[2025-12-21T14:10:29+0100] [ALPM] installed libdbusmenu-qt5 (0.9.3+16.04.20160218-7)
2038-[2025-12-21T14:10:29+0100] [ALPM] installed knotifications5 (5.116.0-3.1)
2039-[2025-12-21T14:10:29+0100] [ALPM] installed kio5 (5.116.0-5.1)
2040:[2025-12-21T14:10:29+0100] [ALPM] installed cutefish-filemanager (0.8-3.1)
2041-[2025-12-21T14:10:29+0100] [ALPM] transaction completed
2042-[2025-12-21T14:10:29+0100] [ALPM] running '30-systemd-daemon-reload-user.hook'...
2043-[2025-12-21T14:10:30+0100] [ALPM] running '30-systemd-hwdb.hook'...
2044-[2025-12-21T14:10:31+0100] [ALPM] running '30-systemd-udev-reload.hook'...
2045-[2025-12-21T14:10:32+0100] [ALPM] running '30-systemd-update.hook'...
I started this by installing calibre:
[2025-12-21T14:04:45+0100] [PACMAN] Running 'pacman -Syu calibre'
Can such an install “drag” an extra file manager?
You can check out the dependencies for yourself:
╰─> pacman -Si calibre
Repository : cachyos-extra-znver4
Name : calibre
Version : 8.7.0-10.1
Description : Ebook management application
Architecture : x86_64_v4
URL : https://calibre-ebook.com
Licenses : GPL-3.0-only
Groups : None
Provides : None
Depends On : hunspell hyphen icu jxrlib libmtp libstemmer libusb libwmf mtdev optipng podofo python-apsw python-beautifulsoup4 python-css-parser python-cssselect python-dateutil python-dnspython
python-faust-cchardet python-feedparser python-html2text python-html5-parser python-jeepney python-lxml python-lxml-html-clean python-markdown python-mechanize python-msgpack python-netifaces
python-pdftotext python-pillow python-psutil python-py7zr python-pychm python-pycryptodome python-pygments python-pykakasi python-pyqt6 python-pyqt6-webengine python-regex python-unrardll python-xxhash
python-zeroconf python-zstandard qt6-imageformats qt6-multimedia qt6-speech qt6-svg qt6-webengine ttf-liberation uchardet udisks2 zstd
Optional Deps : poppler: required for converting pdf to html
python-fonttools: required for font subset feature in epub editor
speech-dispatcher: TTS support in the viewer
Says nothing about a cutefish… although I don’t know about the dependencies of all the dependencies 
I doubt that calibre would bring its “own” filemanager. Then again, you never know.
To recursively see ALL dependencies, you could use pactree calibre (when it is installed) or pactree -s calibre (to look it up in the database).
PS:
Running 'pacman -Syu cutefish-filemanager'
says quite clearly “do a system update and then install cutefish-filemanager”. I have no idea who did that on your machine. Try history | grep cutefish to see if it might have been you.
I doubt it was Calibre that did anything, but not something I can say for certain.
I found the Internet Archive snapshot from the Arch Extra repo from that exact day, and cutefish-filemanager is not there, nor in any of its dependencies around that period. There are not that many snapshots of cutefish-filemanager itself, so I cannot say if it was not briefly required by something at that moment in time.
It has nothing to do with calibre.
That line of pacman -Syu cutefish-filemanager pretty clearly shows it being installed intentionally and solely with no other reason or purpose (aside from the sync/refresh/upgrade it was combined with).
The only way I could see this as not committed by the user would be if it were part of the install process .. as these go through different loops of install groups .. but even then we would probably expect to see it along with other packages and not just by itself.
That or something entirely missed - like a GUI frontend and clicking what is required to commit an install for cutefish.
But whether a GUI or pacman in a terminal .. it would very much seem it is something that was performed intentionally and then forgotten about.
Thank you for the clarification. I guess I suffer from amnesia then 
. Anyway, I learned a lot here.
Thanks to all.
I know that feeling of amnesia. My tip for everyone: start a “diary” where you write down all the changes you do to your system. Sounds tedious, but it’s actually very helpful. Just the other day it helped me with a very similar case of amnesia.