SUMMARY STEPS TO REPRODUCE 1.symlink a folder in home 2.view in dolphim 3.symlinked folder has no entry for number of items in folder OBSERVED RESULT No list of number of items in symlinked folder EXPECTED RESULT Should show number if items in symlinked folder SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS Linux/KDE Plasma: PCLinuxOS KDE Plasma Version: 5.19.5 KDE Frameworks Version: 5.73.0 Qt Version: 5.15.0
I'm on Archlinux and I have the same problem here. I tried downgrading dolphin to older versions. Until version 20.04.3 (included), Dolphin show the number of entries for all folder (even symlink). Starting from 20.07.80, the 'Size' column for symlinked folders is empty.
Noticing the same problem on Debian GNU/Linux testing since 20.08.
I confirm this BUG on Fedora 32. Even worse - the number of items is not shown for several directories in ~user: Documents, Videos, Desktop, Downloads, Public, Templates and for some reason ".gnome2". It makes it so easy to REPRODUCE and find the reason of the bug. It's a REGRESSION as Fedora 30 had Dolphin that worked fine, it showed number of items for all directories, including symlinks with no issue. I believe, it's a "new feature" (calculate files' size instead of number of items) broke this. Maybe recursive calculation of files inside symlink or something is risky (can take long), so someone removed count of number of files non-recursive (just one level) with it by accident. By the way, size of contents also does not work for symlinks and this directories, the same bug?
Added Méven Car to CC list (not sure how to tag/mention someone here, sorry if doing it wrong) as they mentioned possibly-related issue #421831 that is related to the the new content-size feature that can be affecting Number of items mode. Maybe you, Méven Car, can help us with current issue? Thanks.
Fixed in 20.12. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 428712 ***