First of all, this has nothing to do with Dolphin itself, and therefore, cannot be changed inside Dolphin - the drag&drop functionality is provided by the lib/konq library in the kde-baseapps repository.

There have been some related discussions on the kfm-devel mailing list: http://lists.kde.org/?t=133207879300004&r=1&w=2

So far, I see two different proposals to change the behavior:

(a) Make "move" the default (this forum topic). To be honest, I don't think that this is a good idea. When people drag files to USB devices, FTP servers, etc., they probably want to "copy" most of the time. Making "move" the default would make these people wonder where the original files went, and might cause severe data loss in the end.

(b) Making drag&drop "smart", and guess if the user wants to move or copy. This is what Windows does (move if the destination is on the same partition, and copy otherwise). According to past discussions, many people consider this a huge annoyance, and moreover, it's probably not really straightforward to implement and very bug-prone.

Note that you can always press Shift or Control during the drag&drop operation (hold until the mouse button is released) to bypass the menu and force a "move" or "copy" operation, respectively.

Where are we at? Is it now possible, 10 years later to choose the behaviour or is it the decision of some angry man or woman that no one should decide better for themselves

freininghaus wrote:First of all, this has nothing to do with Dolphin itself, and therefore, cannot be changed inside Dolphin - the drag&drop functionality is provided by the lib/konq library in the kde-baseapps repository.
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It is not always working correctly when I press shift sometimes it copies most of the time it moves...

Why should one person impose his/her opinionated decision on everyone else when everything else can be managed with a setting... I do not have Microsoft windows for many reasons (things that I dislike about Windown or that I love about Fedora/KDE/PlasmaShell)... and Mac is awesome compare to windows but so expensive... So I end up using an OS built by a community of (what I perceive like) frustrated people (not all, haha I don't want to sound like I am frustrated and/or not part of the community myself)... I wish the people would be more open-minded like in the NPM/GITHUB or TYPESCRIPT/VSCODE community (for what positive is coming from these open source projects perhaps Microsoft is not bad at everything but I am not a windows user specifically because I love tweaking my system and configuration freedom is my hot button)... (I hope no one will feel bad because of what I said I don't want to be misinterpreted please do not get angry at me what is said apply to any genders of people and/or companies)...

Apparently it is now a confirmed bug and the devs would like to add it at least as an option (which is good enough for me): https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=154804