Caja filemanager is very good, spatial support, tabs, information is shown on the bottom about remaining size, has plugins and scrip support for extra stuff etc. ofc by default it doesnt enable the full path as a location but has option for that so i can type in the path easily.
Thunar is also decent but not as good
Dolphin i didnt like at all, it couldt resize its columns correctly when resizing the window last time i tried, having me to use horizontal scroll to see file information

Webbrowsers. I kinda agree. but I dont really mind open vs closed stuff. I personally find Vivaldi super useful. Has loads of configuration options so i can configure it the way i want. It has sourcecode uploaded periodically but not for the UX/UI itself.

Music players. Don't use much these days but Audacious is pretty simple with some nice options and gets the job done. No bloat.


and what you mean irritating? what do you miss? what features you dont like?

I personally don't have any GUI program that i actually hate at least it doesnt jump into my head straight away. There probably have been few during my 17 years of linux use.
I do prefer terminal for some filemanager tasks ofc if i know i can type and tab complete faster than going through with clicks.

Well, for file managers, i do not like the common designs at all. I think it boils down to file management being an irritating task in itself, but the mainstream GUI choices like gnome/kde/xfce/M$ file managers feel like a hinderance rather than an improvement. Ie. at work i have to use M$ explorer to access most of the work files, except on a Unix server. It's a bare bash environment, but working with it feels a lot more convenient and not as much a timewaste as working with/around M$ explorer. But i also don't like opening the file managers on my linux desktop.

On web browsers one thing that sucks aside from what i wrote above is they try to be their own window manager too: i dislike tabs, and how they function (ie. you need different shortcuts to "tabs" than other windows) there are probably settings for this, but for a user convenience standpoint it'd better to have a shortcut to switch between current and last used window/buffer, which is the functionality that i use the most.

So for me it's breaking workflow (it's a trend nowadays that programs don't even try to work with the desktop environment but do their own thing) or focus (like splash-screens and programs that randomly auto-focus) that are irritating.

Overbloated/Overenginered/inefficient/resource drainer ones.

Electron based apps are a good example.