I use smplayer on windows, this is a good app. Does it run on Wayland? And does it have hardware acceleration for decoding? I had issues on Wayland (gnome) with it.
Cantata is abandoned.
Files I excluded because dolphin is better functionally. It wasn't excluded because I want to skew results in my favor, but because there is no discussion. One exception: in dolphin you cannot open files directly from smb:// shares
> One exception: in dolphin you cannot open files directly from smb:// shares
??? Of course you can.
Your comments sound like you installed KDE ontop of a distro that uses gnome by default, missing half the packages.
KIO exposes pretty much every possible protocol (including smb, dav, ftp/sftp/ssh, etc) to every KDE app, including Dolphin, Kate, Gwenview, Krita, Okular, etc.
If you're trying to open SMB files in Gnome apps, ofc, that's not gonna work.
Sounds like your problem was that while KDE supports SMB, your player does not.
While Gnome will use fuse to mount SMB into the actual file system, KDE built supports for protocol like SMB natively into their libraries.
The KDE approach has the advantage that you get native permissions and don't have to mount them into the filesystem, while the gnome approach has better backwards compatibility for third party apps.
That said, KDEs players as well as VLC should have worked. I'm using KDE with SMB daily.
Gedit (or now gnome-text) is more equivalent of kwrite. Gnome doesn't have an equivalent to kate, me thinks.
Umbrello: https://github.com/gaphor/gaphor
I use smplayer on windows, this is a good app. Does it run on Wayland? And does it have hardware acceleration for decoding? I had issues on Wayland (gnome) with it.
Cantata is abandoned.
Files I excluded because dolphin is better functionally. It wasn't excluded because I want to skew results in my favor, but because there is no discussion. One exception: in dolphin you cannot open files directly from smb:// shares