I mean… fuck that noise.
But also? That is actually a really good idea. The start menu was always fundamentally flawed and it took the bullshit that was windows 7 (?) to make me realize that. Clicking and navigating through nested menus and trying to guess whether a piece of software was listed by company, the app name, or something else was always a mess. Which is why winkey “dawn of war” was the optimal solution.
And as third party app stores (e.g. Steam) may or may not even bother to make a start menu entry to begin with? Having something that can search your computer AND distinguish between “the document that lists what primes I need to farm” and “the Warframe game itself” is a really good idea.
But yeah… I do not want “AI” based shit in an OS that is known to have a crapton of telemetry that gets toggled back on every time it silently runs an update.
between pinned items in start menu and on the taskbar, putting quicklaunch back and populating it, and a few desktop shortcuts… i maybe ‘search’ for an application like that once a year, at most.
Only thing I use Start button for is to turn off the PC. The search is unusable and all shortcuts are in my task bar anyways.
I’m not a Microsoft fan by any means but I’ve not had any real issues with Start menu searching for well over five years.
I just use it to search for the program I want to launch and it’s done that pretty fluidly. To the point where that’s basically all the start menu is for me. If they switch it to copilot without a way to disable it then I’ll probably permanently switch over to Linux when it’s time for an OS rebuild.
It works inconsistently for me to the point that I just can’t rely on it.
I can give a very recent example, my W11 has also be freshly installed and there’s not much stuff installed yet.
I have portable version of HWinfo located in My Documents folder.
If I start typing “hwi” into search it will sometimes find it, sometimes it will find it only if I type “hw” but not find it if I type “hwi” so if I type fast I must then delete character… And sometimes it needs me to type whole name of the application and sometimes it won’t find anything no matter what I type.
Then there is Riva Tuner Statistics Server which is an installed application located on C: in Program Files folder. It launches with RTSS.exe… It may as well not exist for Windows search because no matter what I type it can’t ever find it.
For me the trick was to disable web search. I don’t remember how I did it but you can Google it. Then it was really nice and fast, as it should’ve always been
Unfortunately it has a habit of jumping around due to its asynchronous weird fuzzy search. So when typing fast you sometimes randomly launch the wrong action. It is especially inconsistent, because files are also indexed and by default it also includes web searches so the behavior is always changing.
I believe this got introduced with Windows 10 and feels just bad. Unless you are typing slowly and actually scan the results the search is doing a bad job as an application launcher like it was with Windows 7 for example.
Did you put the application in the start menu during install?
Linux-onlyists have a tendency to not learn how anything works and then blame the “bad workflow” of the OS, so it’s kind of difficult to just assume you didn’t make a mistake.
This might just be the push I need to switch to Linux desktop.
Do it. With proton the last argument for me to use windows is gone (gaming).
Well, it’s not GONE. There are still plenty of games that won’t run well on Linux, or they won’t allow online multiplayer because their anti-cheat software is restricted to Windows. But that number is getting smaller every day.
I’m still on windows because I multibox my main game and the tools to do it don’t work, alt tab is a goddamn mess, minimize window on focus loss is a fucking nightmare, and multiple instances of proton just chew up system resources until the game starts lagging so hard I need to quit every client and try again.
it’s an edge case but that’s quite a lot to deal with when windows just works.
Meh. I don’t play multiplayer games at all other than FFXIV and that I haven’t played in over a year. The only thing that would deter me is some visual novels I play are windows only but I could probably just run them in a virtual machine as they’re not demanding.
Thats why I specified that, for me, that was enough to switch. I agree that proton isnt there yet and 100% compatibility, and we will probably never get to that. But there are enough games on the market for me to do 90% of my gaming on Linux these days.
Can you run Adobe software via proton? As soon as that works I’ll be on Linux.
Look at your usecase, if it really requires adobe suite, you are out of luck i’m afraid. Perhaps you could research running a VM or wine, but I havent tried any of that myself.
If you conclude that you dont need features exclusive to adobe you might be able to find a foss alternative.
No, but there are better alternatives to adobe that don’t hog your ram harder then triple a games
I spent the last ~10 days “playing” with many distros, including testing some current games, and I am literally right now backing up my files and about to reformat my main PC to linux (full drive, no dual). This is after only having experience with copy-paste Raspberry PI guides for my pi-hole.
Don’t totally believe “oh it’s so easy, nothing to configure” - those people are lying, especially if you’ve not used Linux before. But several flavors of Ubuntu are quite pleasant, and I appear to have found a home with PopOS. I can’t find anything that “doesn’t work”, and the worst fixes were just quick searches for help. PopOS won due to nvidia compatibility and a nice, snappy desktop. It also was the fastest in overall reformat cycle time. My wife’s computer is still Windows, if I do have any microsoft emergencies.
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is rather easy.
But anyway, no mainstream user-friendly Linux distribution is that hard to use if you can read and think.
So when people say that they can’t manage one on their desktop - they also usually can’t manage Windows on their desktop, they just think they can.
It’s “easy” - but that is very subjective, depending on how much you’ve down outside “turning Windows on”. You DO need to make sure your router allows assigning a DNS ip address. Some ISP-supplied units are rather locked down.
I recommend a “kit” from somewhere like CanaKit (amazon has them), to make sure you get the parts you need. It can run on smaller/cheaper kits, but I say get a Pi3 or 4 variant.
Then following the link above, there is great documentation on install. Install “Putty” on windows, which will log into your Pi and allow remote command line, and then the entire process is copy-paste from guides.
After you finish, you may feel “oh that was easy!” - but there’s still some stuff to learn and get used to along the way.
It’s stupid easy. Flash DietPi to the SD card, select pi hole from the package list, then point your router to the IP for DNS.
Of course, it should be plugged directly into your router, so a zero won’t work without an ethernet hat.
There are some games that just will not work even under proton, or that have functional restrictions. It’s way fewer games than it used to be, but it’s still not an absolutely perfect solution. I would love to make Linux my gaming OS instead of my “getting shit done” OS like it currently is, I’ve been advocating for it for a few decades at this point and it’s almost there, but it’s not to a point yet where I can unreservedly recommend it to gamers. If you aren’t a gamer I’d say it’s already good enough for anything you need.
Congrats on picking an awesome distro! :) Pop is really nice, and I’m really excited to see what they do with their desktop environment. I feel like we’re spoiled for choice right now on Linux.
There are always things to configure, just like on Windows. I think some people kind of forget that they had to learn to configure things on Windows at one point. xD
Ok wow… did I jinx myself with this post. Immediately after posting here, I began the install/config phase of a fresh reformat. Encountered a weirdness that the system couldn’t sleep/suspend - immediately woke up. 8 hours later… After installing 5 different distros to confirm it was ALL linux versions (even debian)…
I spent the entire day, 8 hours, searching and referencing and troubleshooting. FINALLY one very random corner of the internet, on an ARCH-LINUX forum, a small comment mentioned that my Gigabyte B550 “had a problem” with sleep. SO THEN I had to start cross-referencing those words (couldn’t “use” the Arch guide, since I was on Pop), and my dude/dudette… I was up to 1am.
Ultimately, I had to COMBINE the “solutions” of FOUR different results, across 2017-2020 (none actually on Ubuntu 22.04) to get the fix to work. Like one taught me the script, but the locations were wrong, one taught me the service I needed, but it was outdated, and then another taught how to fix a service, etc etc, cascading solutions.
SO at close to 2AM - after documenting my own guide, another raw metal install of PopOS, wrote my script & service… and… “it just works!” (pun intended). It works. It sleeps. Have to disable the Gigabyte B550M “GPP0 and GPP8” device, which are bridges to the NVMe drives.
Funny enough though, as much as this is “yup, thats Linux!” I feel like it’s not fair, and not Linux’s fault. This is a random, and really unlucky, issue with my specific board. I am typing this to you, while on my new PopOS install, and sleep/suspend still works.
What a ride!
About a month ago Windows 11 started forcing ads for apps and services I didn’t need. Immediately installed a popular Linux distribution to have some peace of mind. There’s every flavor of desktop out there. I picked one for work and games (pop_os). It’s out of my way most of the time and it’s not trying to sell me anything. I recommend it, specially, if you’re someone that doesn’t fiddle with settings too much, it just work.
I love this idea. The reason people continue using Windows is because they’re used to it. Messing with the Start button is going to piss off even the most patient users. Not to mention it’ll be an absolute nightmare for any IT department. Just imagine an army of Karens calling your hotline first thing on Monday morning, yelling at you because you took away the Start button. It’ll make Windows 8 look like a huge success.
They already fucked with start menu and search and it’s already a problem for IT. I can’t find any app I got installed unless I spell it out right, and even then it might work with just 3/8 letters in but no further.
Sometimes I just click through program files cause it’s faster.
I feel like things like Classic Shell (or whatever the go-to alternative is nowadays) are just going to make bank from enterprise customers suddenly wanting to make their desktops usable for the average user.
Doubtful. It’s hard enough to get programs past our security team and having half malware bundled programs like this won’t be an easy task.
Lol, what? There is no malware in classic shell, or start11 or explorer patcher. Wtf are you talking about?
Only if they promise to remove the most pointless keyboard button in the world as well.
The Windows key? I use it constantly.
Windows + Left/Right to dock screens, Windows + E for a quick file explorer, Windows + X for settings and dev options, Windows + P to adjust your second monitor, I’m sure there’s other hotkeys as well.
- Win+X U U Shutdown
- Win+L Lock
- Win+V Clipboard history (might need to be enabled but * very useful)
- Win+Tab Visual alt tab
- Win+D Show desktop
- Win+S Screen snipping tool (for partial screenshot)
- Win and start typing for search
- Win+1-9 switch between windows (works well if your apps are pinned to taskbar in specific order)
Use all of these and more
