Drag and drop not working inside Nautilus on Ubuntu 17.10

Question

I'm having a strange problem on Ubuntu 17.10: when I try to drag and drop something inside Nautilus it simply doesn't work, it doesn't even select the item, it seems like it's ignoring the action... Also, I cannot select things inside nautilus by drawing rectangles with the mouse.

All of these actions work only on the Desktop. Here is a demo:

I'm using the Xorg session with nVidia proprietary drivers. I also noticed that Nautilus seems to hang when I try to copy, paste or cut a file...

EDIT 1: I solved the problem for the slow copy/paste by disabling the clipboard sync plugin of KDEConnect. I also discovered that if I open Nautilus as root, I can drag and drop or select whatever I want...

Answer 1

As Matteo pointed out himself this happens if the Nautilus Flowbox View is enabled. To disable it open a terminal and execute the following:

gsettings set org.gnome.nautilus.preferences use-experimental-views false

Of course you can use the dconf-Editor as well and follow the path above to toggle the setting.

Answer 2

It seems I found the culprit: it's the Nautilus flowbox view! I enabled it because I like the automatic streching, but it seems it's disabling the drag and drop and select option. So for now I disabled it

Answer 3

You can toggle list view mode, and drag'n'drop will work as expected.

Click the button besides the search button, at the top right corner of the window, next to the window controls:

Now you can drag'n'drop.

You can also use Ctrl + mouse wheel to enlarge file/folder thumbnails.

Answer 4

To fix this, all you have to do is to disable the experimental view again.

Open Nautilus file manager. On the top left, click on Files->Preferences. Clear the “Use the new views” option under Experimental.

Close Files then open again.