Terminal > Windows Registry.
Web search on the start menu.
🤮
Web in the search, AI in the search, personal assistant in your files, things in your things that you don’t want, didn’t ask for and are struggling to extract.
I wouldn’t mind that as an optional function, having a single global search field that brings up whatever you are looking for seems really convenient on paper.
Of course not the way msoft does it, where you never get the thing you want unless you are being really precise (like searching for appdata only yielding web results until you specifically type %APPDATA%).
Its even worse than that. It is completely unpredictable and just does what it want. When I type in “Vi”, the first choice is Visual Studio. It will stay on Visual Studio until I have typed in “Visual Studi”. But if I’m a fast typer, and I type in the entirety of “Visual Studio”, it opens Visual Studio Code.
So the fastest way to open up Code is to type “VSC”. This doesn’t work with “VS” for Visual Studio.
I have to type out “Spot” specifically to open Spotify. Typing out Spotify opens edge.
There are also files and programs it cannot find despite having been installed for years, even though I’ve MANUALLY added the paths to the searched directories.
If anyone of you is on Windows for whatever reason and want your mind blown, try downloading a little program called Everything. It can literally find every single program on your computer as fast as you can type. And it looks up exactly what you type in. It also supports wildcard characters etc. This is the kind of behavior I expect from my computer. Sure, make a shiny frontend for casual users who don’t need to see every single file on their system, but please, why do I have to go through third parties to get this experience on an OS that my company paid for, when I can get the same experience out of the box on any free Linux distro?
I honestly thought I was the only one that has those problems. I think the thing that gets me is when you install a program, the installer closes, you don’t know where in gods name it just installed to, so you type the name of the program and windows is like “sorry never heard of it”, so you go to the programs list and it’s right there.
What you mentioned is particularly frustrating because I too will type full program names and it often switches on the very last letter. It’s even more frustrating that the user can’t manipulate the search by typing a few letters, realizing those letters are shared by two programs, and then typing a few more letters to lead it to your program without moving to the mouse. Instead it acts like you’ve added no info and recommends the same thing.
Also if you go to uninstall a program by right clicking it in start or search and instead of uninstalling it presents you with a list of programs which you then have to go find the program again in and then hit uninstall again. Been that way for 8 years now.
Also if I could pick my search engine rather than getting one of the shittiest ones rammed down my throat
For about a year or two, windows had an amazing search from the menu that used a blazing fast index search to search files, directories, and file contents locally and almost instantaneously. It was a glorious thing.
I cannot think of a case in which a user would not need to distinguish between web search and file search (other than the convenience of a single click). I do use a unified search on my phone that includes files, apps, and contacts, and if it’s not in any of those, it will launch a web search using the query. That is more than adequate. If it were performing the web search in real time, I wouldn’t be able to easily access apps and contacts, and the results would slow and change while typing.
I remember that, pretty sure it was in win7 or early win10, before they crammed cortana in there and you had to start jumping through hoops to disable all the garbage they added.
As for the search results, I’m not saying the user shouldn’t be able to distinguish them; in fact the way I imagine it is that the results are grouped by category and in a user determined order of priority.
For the loading times I have nothing, that isnt really avoidable with my idea.
Perhaps with some visual trickery that fades or slides the results in over a second or two, ending on the web results. It would give the web search part time to run behind the scenes, seemingly appearing as quickly as the others.
“Holy Hannah!” That’s great
“Montana Banana!” also an acceptable exclamation
Normal people (idiots) would rather spend 4 years of their overall life “hacking” with Windows to avoid 30 minutes learning to use a forward slash.
Meanwhile the entire Internet :
https://example.com/Laura/Epsom
Laura Epsom? Is that Lorem Ipsum for the barbaric tribes of Britannia?
Specifically these Britons. https://youtu.be/F33HokcX8M0?si=EfpM3X0PxsnmkQnS
Tfw windows uses forward slashes too. Now let’s talk about how *nix is case sensitive because laziness.
But all fall short of God’s glory that is Temple OS.
(Idiots)… Way to roast normal people. Don’t know if they will ever recover. The best bit was putting it in brackets.
You are normal people.
I’ve spent ways less time editing the windows registry than I’ve spent trying to fix all the dual monitor bugs with linux.
Windows issues/changes are a 30 second google search away, linux issues often enough require a 1 hour deep dive into multiple forums.
Have you googled Windows issues? Every problem apparently is fixed by running chkdsk or download a “driver updater”. And it wasn’t exactly good in the past either.
If you don’t know what to search, how to word it, or where to look instead of clicking the first link with “[SOLUTION]” then maybe you shouldn’t be troubleshooting…
It… Depends… Also, you picked the wrong platform to argue against Linux on 😅
Wayland pretty much solves every single dual monitor issue. Only problem now is getting complete Nvidia support and patching out edge cases. I dual monitor all the time, and not just normal dual monitor either, the monitor count increases or decreases on a whim and not a single screen in use are the same. They all have different refresh rates, resolutions, orientations, vrr & hdr support, color ranges, etc. everything works as expected.
Last time I checked (during the installation of Fedora 39), HDR support was nearly non-existent in Linux, with the only options being some hacky experimental support for gaming via Gamescope. Has that changed in the last 6 months? It’s the only thing holding me back from jumping to Linux these days.
You sound like an (idiot); you as an individual are not defined by your OS of preference of all things, and by all means, you are one of the normals.
I mean it’s probably a similar amount of time and effort trying to fix Windows than it is learning to use Linux.
I once spent several hours at work trying to mount a USB drive to red hat. I’ll keep fighting windows for now.
On work machines, it may also be on purpose (IT department having restricted the use of USB storage).
One thing Linux needs to do is change the perception of how hard everything is compared to Windows. Some things are extremely less difficult on Linux.
Both OS are hard if you don’t know how to use them.
Both OS are easy if you know how to use them.
Linux’s problem is fragmentation. There’s not a single OS that many people are familiar with like Windows. Instead there’s hundreds of different distros that all function in a variety of different ways. Even if a person learns to do something on Mint or Ubuntu, they will be completely lost trying to do the same thing on Fedora or Arch.
hundreds of different distros
And out of those “hundreds” only a handful of them are actually popular and progressing innovation…
As someone who’s distro hopped across a wide verity of distros, the fundamentals are more less the same across all of them. Just go with a popular distro with good documentation and you’ll be fine. If you’ve learned enough from mint to feel comfortable tackling Arch Linux, then the documention (e.g. ArchWiki) will be your strongest asset.
Good documentation is great to have. Here’s the thing though. If you need documentation to use an OS… That just proves that it really is harder for people to use.
Mint and Windows both share the ability to pick it up and use it for the majority of what most people do. Arch is like the textbook example of having to learn a bunch in order to use Linux.
I’d argue that there’s like 4 ways that 90% of distros work like and even they are extremely similar to each other. You got Fedora, Debian, Arch, and whatever Gentoo users do when they are in the dark in the basement. The rest are niche and weird stuff that not even Linux hardcore fans know all about. Similarly there’s only two desktop things that matter, GTK or QT. Everything else is us nerds nick-picking.
Ok, there’s also nixOS and the new wave of atomic monolithic containerized whatever distros, but they are like, super new and the resulting system is indistinguishable for the end used from the other 4 main.
Definitely this. I have been eyeballing Linux for years, always intimidated by the CLI and the notion that everything you try to do on Linux requires user research and work first.
Now I finally made the switch a couple days ago, and while it took a bit of tinkering and googling here and there I am amazed how simple, even way simpler than on windows, the experience for a an average user is, particularly with the very beginner friendly distro I went with (bazzite/gnome).
It just works right out the box for 90% of whatever I want to do, configuring it is simply flipping some switches in the software and extension apps. Feels more like setting up a new smartphone than a PC. I didn’t even have to mess with the CLI all that much, perhaps half a dozen times so far, and each time i followed specific steps in a guide or tutorial, or tried out some basic things like file search.
It is good to send new users to something like Gnome they can branch out. I think Cosmic will be a great fit as well. Outside of updates, you don’t have to do too much in the CLI really. But long as you learn some of the basics how to get around and maybe make an alias. I think that will get you by just fine on Linux. I do think people should get users to try less Windows like experiences on Linux. Because a Windows like UI will just make them miss Windows.
I do think people should get users to try less Windows like experiences on Linux. Because a Windows like UI will just make them miss Windows.
That is actually the exact reason I went with gnome instead of KDE myself; I find it much easier to learn a new system than to adjust habits that have formed for years. I will probably eventually switch to KDE when i feel fully comfortable, because it is supposedly slightly better in performance and far more customizable.
Problem is is that is that too many people insist on doing things the Windows way and they get frustrated because of it. For example, instead of going to the software center, they choose to download their programs from a website, even though that’s not how you’re supposed to do it most of the time. They’ll also spend hours trying to get Windows only programs to run, when there are alternatives available that work just as well.
That’s absolutely true. I made the same mistakes and I got absolutely mad.
I still don’t fully know how to install rpm files lmao, that’s how I learned about Apt back on linux mint, don’t remember what I was trying to install as it was like 15 years ago. Deb files were nice because they did work like a windows user would expect.
I always show people single click printer setups.
Linux (and sometimes Android) is the only platform printers actually work reliably.
You have to click? I turn on my networked printer and every Linux machine on my network sets it up whether I wanted them to or not.
