Between these issues, the end of support for Windows 10, and the total lack of respect for customers ("yes/maybe later" is unacceptable), I'm happy for my recent switch to Linux.
Fedora Kinoite (atomic + KDE) has been a breath of fresh air. The Dolphin file manager alone was worth the switch, and connecting my phone via KDE Connect is the most excited I've been about software in a while. The atomic part has been surprisingly painless.
It hasn't been free from small bugs (what software is, nowadays?), but at least I know they're not there because of greed, so it pushes me towards contributing instead of hating the developers.
I say this with love for Linux. Controversially, I don't think there is a file manager available on any platform as good as Windows file explorer. MacOS finder is an actual joke. Gnome's files is a less feature-rich finder and Dolphin comes close but still lags behind Windows explorer IMO.
I'd love to see a shameless rip of of Windows explorer for Linux
In what way is the MS Windows file explorer good? It neither has tabs, side-by-side view, pattern selection, performant search, an UI, that doesn't regularly blocks and becomes unresponsive, etc... .
What feature does it have, that some other file manager, doesn't have? I can't think of any?
I would've agreed back in the Win10 days, but Win11 explorer is shit. I have a 9800x3d, literally top of the line CPU with a crazy fast brand new NVMe SSD, and Win11 explorer takes a good 3 seconds from time to time to load any folder on my system. VERY often, the explorer window is even blank as if it's loading a web application (it is) for a few seconds! There's some decent QoL like tabs and stuff like that, but I can't believe how fucking sluggish it is in regular operation, alongside all the other terrible changes M$ decided to make.
I upgraded back down to Win10 and plan on making it my absolute last Windows version I ever use, Win 11 is just unbelievably shit in so many ways even by M$ standards.
> file manager available on any platform as good as Windows file explorer.
How come? I can't think of a single redeeming feature of windows file explorer that I need (or use).
Heck, it effectively doesn't have text search (grep -R) and b/c it's so bad there is the "window search" service that even worse. It has the absolutely worst imaginable zip file (erm folder) reader as a side bonus. Security file permissions management is just horrid (along with the fact some of them are coupled with registry paths)
I don't recall seeing a correct file system operation time estimation.
Edit - since explorer.exe is both the shell and the file manager, and the former craps itself often enough (task manager or taskkill /im explorer.exe), it's another negative point.
I tried to love the Linux file manager, but it's a mess with current fedora kde dolphin crashes randomly, mounted nas storage with smb or NFS (synology nas) is slower and depending on how you mount the storage some apps can't open the files.
Maybe the crashes could be solved with a more stable os like debian, but the explorer shell integration is on windows on another level with network storage.
What specifically in Windows file manager are you talking about? I quite like Gnome's Files but mostly I like MacOS 's column mode and which it were elsewhere. I think it depends on what tasks you reach to the file manager for though.
> don't think there is a file manager available on any platform as good as Windows file explorer
Good joke, made my day! : )
(very sorry, it is late, would love to collect and expand in a dedicated thread later. a prime reason for hating to turn on my work computer - no Windows at home! -, me, the tech enthusiast since learned how to hold a screwdriver, is Windows Explorer. so many senseless inconsistencies with unfinished junk petrified into unmutable practicies that changing line of work where never ever need to use Windows again is getting increasingly attractive very fast. even goat herding sounds a sensible alternative sometimes)
KDE Connect works on Windows, and I think mac too. I get the feeling that it's really just people making stuff for themselves and sharing it with the world, and not trying to "win" in some fashion.
You can, I believe it's a build artifact if you go on KDE's Gitlab, or whatever, instance. Same thing for Windows. The Windows version doesn't have all of the same features as Linux, so I don't know how featureful it is for macOS.
Set up Kate with some LSP clients and dig through the settings for stuff you'd use and you'll have a better Sublime Text replacement for when you don't want to break out an entire IDE to edit some text.
I haven't gotten into battery optimization yet but I will say, I picked up a laptop not too long ago and put Arch Linux on it with Niri (window manager).
I am getting about ~4 hours of active usage where the display is on full time and I'm doing things (code editing web apps and scripts, running Docker containers, browsing, listening to music, etc.). I wouldn't mind more battery life out of it if possible, but it's not the end of the world.
What I'm really happy about is the price / performance ratio of Nimo's laptops.
It was $575 on Amazon a few months ago. It's a 15" 1080p IPS display, Ryzen 7 6800H (8 core / 16 threads), 32 GB of memory, 1TB SSD with an integrated AMD 680M GPU. That GPU can use up to 8 GB of system memory as its VRAM (you can configure the amount in the BIOS). It also has a 2 year warranty.
I initially got it as a travel laptop since I mainly use desktop machines. The keyboard is good and has a backlight, the trackpad is good to the point where I don't use trackpads much at all and I don't feel like it's in the way or a problem. Niri is super trackpad optimized too, I'm using 3-4 finger gestures a lot.
It's quite fast for what I'm doing with it and like it a lot. Once I'm back from traveling, I'll write an extensive blog post on my experience with it.
I don't work for the company or have any affiliation with them, I bought it with my own money. The only interaction I had with them was calling their support before I bought it to see if it was still returnable if I formatted the drive and put Linux on it. They said absolutely, it's no problem. I had no intent on returning it unless the hardware died early. For reference when I called I got a human very quickly and they were friendly.
Grab something that ships with Linux and has Linux support from the vendor you buy it from. Also, get somewhat recent AMD hardware without a dGPU.
If you spend some time tweaking some settings and tuning drivers, I've been able to squeeze 10-12hrs out of an 16t Zen 3 laptop on 7nm node, and 8-12hrs out of a 16t Zen 4 refresh laptop on a 4nm node. You should be able to squeeze more out of a Zen 5 refresh with efficiency cores on a smaller node.
Out of the box, Linux is configured for the widest compatibility, and that means not enabling or tuning all settings for optimal battery life. Getting good battery life is achievable, just expect to do some tweaking.
For example:
- Using the amd_pstate in active mode
- TuneD (or power-profiles-daemon, but it's less comprehensive)
- powertop --auto-tune
- ASPM in powersave mode
- WiFi/BT driver power management
- Tweaking amdgpu power management settings
- Adjusting brightness/backlight timeout
- Downclocking & undervolting CPU/APU
- Also look into the kernel's thermal governors
TuneD + powertop will take care of most of that for you automatically, modern Linux distros enable amd_pstate in active mode by default, there are tools for automating GPU powersaving, and backlight behavior has a GUI in DEs.
The more reasonable alternative is to have a souped up linux desktop at home and access it remotely with a low latency "game" streaming protocol such as sunshine+moonlight. It's a bit involved to set up and make work properly trough a low quality internet link but the final result affords the choice of virtually any laptop, freeing you from worrying about performance and battery life when running things that saps energy. You can even buy a common pc laptop, install linux and as long as you can get it to use less than 5W of energy when doing the remote streaming (which is pretty easy with most laptops from the last 10 years), you will get between (assuming decent, non degraded battery) 6 and 11 hours of battery life and potentially way more if it has one of those giant 90Wh batteries in it.
In my case I went with an old thinkpad X220, the battery is heavily degraded and It can't do less than 13W while streaming even with hardware video decoding due to the old inefficient chips in it, but even then I get between 3 to 4 hours of remote usage out of it. I can connect it to my computer using whatever available wi-fi or 4g/5g tethering, tailscale takes care of encryption and making a direct connection (no hops, thats important for latency). I've swapped the wlan card (multiple generations behind) with a modern intel wlan with wi-fi 6 which helps getting good network performance.
Sunshine can achieve a fluid performance (60fps, low latency, low res) as long as it can get between 200KiB/s (idling) and 300KiB/s of bandwidth. Tuning sunshine was a bit of a pain since it was really made for local ethernet streaming at 10MiB/s+. The first thing is to sacrifice encoding latency by swapping the "inefficient" hardware encoder with a software encoder set to one of the "slow" presets. This will lower your bandwidth req. right away and the latency increase is negligible when taking into account typical wan network latency. Host CPU load is minor at low resolutions and 60fps. H264 is all that X220 can decode, so H264 it is, but newer machines should afford you fancier video encoders. For some reason you can't control the Opus encoder bitrate and in my tests it was encoding at 64KiB/s (512kbps !), so usually I disable sound. There seems to be a 128kbps mode in the code but it might be busted for now. Disabling FEC also helps. Just remember that sticking to low resolutions makes everything quadratically more efficient :). Chroma subsampling is the enemy of colorful text, so you will want to enable 4:4:4 mode in moonlight if your hardware decoder supports it! (and of course the X220 hardware dec. can't do that, so no sharp syntax highlight for me when on battery!, though because of my astigmatism I like using bold text which is less susceptible to that....)
Anyway, sorry for my info dump, just wanted to share.
> this update disrupts mouse and keyboard functionality within the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE), making them unresponsive
> Early last week, Microsoft accidentally broke the Windows Media Creation Tool (MCT) just a day ahead of Windows 10's end-of-life. Additionally, the company began requiring Online Accounts for Windows 11 installations, making them increasingly difficult to bypass.
> Every previously reported issue has been addressed or resolved, except for the broken localhost functionality and now this WinRE problem.
Wonder if they used Copilot for coding those features and then AI to review them. I bet the productivity of the engineers was off the charts for that one.
In Win11 as admin, take ownership of the following files, and remove all permissions for the system user. This prevents any updates and can be easily undone at any time. I turned off updates, and life is much better. I no longer feel guilty about having my system "at risk". It's no longer worth the pain of updates.
Yea at this point updating stuff is just almost more pain than pleasure, since new features are very limited nowadays and most of the time things end up being more broken.
For example, the latest MacOS sequoia security update broke the touch id reader when logging in, i need to type my password now everytime. And lets not forget about the new glass design and UI changes in the latest iOS.
Im pretty tired of updates at this point and will push them out unless absolutely necessary.
I can't wait to try this. Long have I feuded with the Task Scheduler and its slippery ability to reenable the update services when I look away. Thanks!
> I no longer feel guilty about having my system "at risk".
The risk of not updating your desktop OS every week is vastly overstated, and I believe this is at least in part due to fear mongering by companies like Microsoft who use said fear as a tool to keep people on the latest version with the latest tracking and ads.
I've encountered a lot more grief from ill-managed updates - and abuse of their delivery mechanism as a perverse means to shove unwanted software down my throat - than from the impact of any security incidents arising out of missing, delaying or contravening one.
The first issue is you don't meaningfully control the timing (ie. defer until you have time to deal with any fallout, which may be >30 days), and that you can't manage your risk by reviewing what's in them and selectively picking the ones you want (ie. true security fixes with limited surface area to bork things).
Once upon a time both those things were easy (eg. meaningful descriptions) and under your control.
Microsoft updates feel like they are boiling the frog, changing the whole OS to something you never signed up for. Why can't they stick to just security and stick their bloatware AI crap in Windows 12
There's been a little bit of a trend with windows that things they start experimenting with towards the end of the life of version N become a focus for version N+1. In the case of windows 11, they had been trying to get onto the dual-display portables wave with a "Windows 10X", but cancelled it and brought much of the UI over to 11 to a mild reception. I'd be really surprised if they don't try and leverage AI as much as they can with the next full version (and whatever fun name they give it).
More to the point, I'd agree I'd love it if they had a widely available basic version and a separate version where they can chase the latest shiny object, but I can't see them being motivated to do that in the foreseeable future.
Not "more", but they're on the same level. I was hit with recovery bug today on my Windows desktop, and with totally fubar-d Gnome 49.1 release on Arch laptop just yesterday :/
For me, right now, CachyOS is "more". I do run KDE, however, and I don't use a ton of 3rd party themes/plugins/stuff (which will break any install).
I've used Arch on both servers and on desktop for a few years, and the only issue I ever had was pacman breaking due to both signing and file conflicts. I also had this on Debian and Ubuntu, (apt just simply stopped working, and nothing I did would make it work), so it isn't unique to Arch.
I'm not being defensive of Arch, I just think a lot of folks think rolling release = bugs. For the ones that do have stuff break, they typically modify their environment with huge customizations that would break anything, including Debian, Ubuntu, Windows, or any other OS.
I'll report back if my CachyOS install ever breaks, however, the only reason I stopped using Arch prior to this was that I was playing a few games that didn't work. Now, they do, and I don't really play new games or games with anti-cheat, and all my other software (I'm a retired/disabled dev) works fine.
This update seems to be a real mess. It tries to install for since days and always stops at 38% and then rolls back. Instead of a reasonable error message it keeps retrying, rendering my laptop unusable for 30 min.
Best of luck, had that crop up occasionally with multiple updates as one offs across multiple machines. Sometimes all the typical troubleshooting steps (troubleshooter, clearing local update files, local repairs) won't fix it and your best option is to do a "upgrade" install with 'keep all files' selected using the media creation tool.
I went through the list that ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity gave me. I can rule out the recovery partition and the update cache at least. I think one part was the windows sandbox feature which is known to make problems. Got a new error after deinstalling. It is just plain frustrating however. Having a PhD in computer science and looking for the needle in the haystack to just be able to use your PC in a reasonable way. If I did not have to use awkward SAP Excel Pluginsto connect to our accounting and other MS stuff, this episode nearly triggered me to finally switch to a decent OS I somehow can understand again.
I wonder if this is related to what I experienced. After the update (update and shoutdown reliably updates and restarts again, does not shut down) a parctice of mine switching Control and Fn keys on my Mac so Control key function gets into the same physical position as Ctrl on the PC keyboard, so using Windwos through Microsoft Remote Desktop and at the keyboard of the Windows computer is a smoother switch, is not working anymore. Windows, through the Remote Desktop does not register the Fn key as Ctrl anymore. The whole thing does not make sense to me. The Remote Desktop software on Mac did not change, MacOS should send Remote Desktop the signal of Control key pressed when pressing Fn, the Windows update shall have no effect, yet the sole change here was the Windows update when this annoying thing emerged. I simply had no time to dive into diagnostics and find the underlying reason, it is less resource intensive and less painfull - but one more annoyance on top of the many concerning Windows use - learning to use different Ctrl button location on Mac and PC keyboard again (done before, before learning the Control <> Fn switch trick).
the update immediately prior to this broke password protected fileshares. Had to wait weeks for a patch to be deployed.
What's worse, is that so many similar problems have occured over the last 20 years is that when you try to search for the problem, you are highly likely to not find the actual cause+workaround, but will instead find one from years before that doesn't exactly apply to the current situation.
Readit News
Fedora Kinoite (atomic + KDE) has been a breath of fresh air. The Dolphin file manager alone was worth the switch, and connecting my phone via KDE Connect is the most excited I've been about software in a while. The atomic part has been surprisingly painless.
It hasn't been free from small bugs (what software is, nowadays?), but at least I know they're not there because of greed, so it pushes me towards contributing instead of hating the developers.
I'd love to see a shameless rip of of Windows explorer for Linux
- Tree view on main panel (can expand folders without navigating into them).
- Checksum validation under "properties".
- Filter function (like search, but faster and persistent across navigation).
- When dragging and dropping, explicit distinction between "move here", "copy here", "link here", and "move into new folder".
- Browsing SFTP drives natively.
- Native Git integration.
- Well integrated notifications for long operations.
- Disk usage statistics (technically "filelight"). Like WinDirStat, but with circles.
In what way is the MS Windows file explorer good? It neither has tabs, side-by-side view, pattern selection, performant search, an UI, that doesn't regularly blocks and becomes unresponsive, etc... .
What feature does it have, that some other file manager, doesn't have? I can't think of any?
I upgraded back down to Win10 and plan on making it my absolute last Windows version I ever use, Win 11 is just unbelievably shit in so many ways even by M$ standards.
How come? I can't think of a single redeeming feature of windows file explorer that I need (or use).
Heck, it effectively doesn't have text search (grep -R) and b/c it's so bad there is the "window search" service that even worse. It has the absolutely worst imaginable zip file (erm folder) reader as a side bonus. Security file permissions management is just horrid (along with the fact some of them are coupled with registry paths)
I don't recall seeing a correct file system operation time estimation.
Edit - since explorer.exe is both the shell and the file manager, and the former craps itself often enough (task manager or taskkill /im explorer.exe), it's another negative point.
For me the perfect file manager is Total Commander or Midnight Commander or Double Commadner.
Maybe the crashes could be solved with a more stable os like debian, but the explorer shell integration is on windows on another level with network storage.
Good joke, made my day! : )
(very sorry, it is late, would love to collect and expand in a dedicated thread later. a prime reason for hating to turn on my work computer - no Windows at home! -, me, the tech enthusiast since learned how to hold a screwdriver, is Windows Explorer. so many senseless inconsistencies with unfinished junk petrified into unmutable practicies that changing line of work where never ever need to use Windows again is getting increasingly attractive very fast. even goat herding sounds a sensible alternative sometimes)
I am getting about ~4 hours of active usage where the display is on full time and I'm doing things (code editing web apps and scripts, running Docker containers, browsing, listening to music, etc.). I wouldn't mind more battery life out of it if possible, but it's not the end of the world.
What I'm really happy about is the price / performance ratio of Nimo's laptops.
I picked this one up: https://www.nimopc.com/products/nimo-15-6-n155-r7-6800h-fhd-...
It was $575 on Amazon a few months ago. It's a 15" 1080p IPS display, Ryzen 7 6800H (8 core / 16 threads), 32 GB of memory, 1TB SSD with an integrated AMD 680M GPU. That GPU can use up to 8 GB of system memory as its VRAM (you can configure the amount in the BIOS). It also has a 2 year warranty.
I initially got it as a travel laptop since I mainly use desktop machines. The keyboard is good and has a backlight, the trackpad is good to the point where I don't use trackpads much at all and I don't feel like it's in the way or a problem. Niri is super trackpad optimized too, I'm using 3-4 finger gestures a lot.
It's quite fast for what I'm doing with it and like it a lot. Once I'm back from traveling, I'll write an extensive blog post on my experience with it.
I don't work for the company or have any affiliation with them, I bought it with my own money. The only interaction I had with them was calling their support before I bought it to see if it was still returnable if I formatted the drive and put Linux on it. They said absolutely, it's no problem. I had no intent on returning it unless the hardware died early. For reference when I called I got a human very quickly and they were friendly.
If you spend some time tweaking some settings and tuning drivers, I've been able to squeeze 10-12hrs out of an 16t Zen 3 laptop on 7nm node, and 8-12hrs out of a 16t Zen 4 refresh laptop on a 4nm node. You should be able to squeeze more out of a Zen 5 refresh with efficiency cores on a smaller node.
Out of the box, Linux is configured for the widest compatibility, and that means not enabling or tuning all settings for optimal battery life. Getting good battery life is achievable, just expect to do some tweaking.
For example:
- Using the amd_pstate in active mode
- TuneD (or power-profiles-daemon, but it's less comprehensive)
- powertop --auto-tune
- ASPM in powersave mode
- WiFi/BT driver power management
- Tweaking amdgpu power management settings
- Adjusting brightness/backlight timeout
- Downclocking & undervolting CPU/APU
- Also look into the kernel's thermal governors
TuneD + powertop will take care of most of that for you automatically, modern Linux distros enable amd_pstate in active mode by default, there are tools for automating GPU powersaving, and backlight behavior has a GUI in DEs.
See:
- https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Category:Power_management
- https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Power_management
- https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/power/index.html
- https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/driver-api/pm/devices...
- https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/driver-api/thermal/in...
In my case I went with an old thinkpad X220, the battery is heavily degraded and It can't do less than 13W while streaming even with hardware video decoding due to the old inefficient chips in it, but even then I get between 3 to 4 hours of remote usage out of it. I can connect it to my computer using whatever available wi-fi or 4g/5g tethering, tailscale takes care of encryption and making a direct connection (no hops, thats important for latency). I've swapped the wlan card (multiple generations behind) with a modern intel wlan with wi-fi 6 which helps getting good network performance.
Sunshine can achieve a fluid performance (60fps, low latency, low res) as long as it can get between 200KiB/s (idling) and 300KiB/s of bandwidth. Tuning sunshine was a bit of a pain since it was really made for local ethernet streaming at 10MiB/s+. The first thing is to sacrifice encoding latency by swapping the "inefficient" hardware encoder with a software encoder set to one of the "slow" presets. This will lower your bandwidth req. right away and the latency increase is negligible when taking into account typical wan network latency. Host CPU load is minor at low resolutions and 60fps. H264 is all that X220 can decode, so H264 it is, but newer machines should afford you fancier video encoders. For some reason you can't control the Opus encoder bitrate and in my tests it was encoding at 64KiB/s (512kbps !), so usually I disable sound. There seems to be a 128kbps mode in the code but it might be busted for now. Disabling FEC also helps. Just remember that sticking to low resolutions makes everything quadratically more efficient :). Chroma subsampling is the enemy of colorful text, so you will want to enable 4:4:4 mode in moonlight if your hardware decoder supports it! (and of course the X220 hardware dec. can't do that, so no sharp syntax highlight for me when on battery!, though because of my astigmatism I like using bold text which is less susceptible to that....)
Anyway, sorry for my info dump, just wanted to share.
Deleted Comment
> Early last week, Microsoft accidentally broke the Windows Media Creation Tool (MCT) just a day ahead of Windows 10's end-of-life. Additionally, the company began requiring Online Accounts for Windows 11 installations, making them increasingly difficult to bypass.
> Every previously reported issue has been addressed or resolved, except for the broken localhost functionality and now this WinRE problem.
C:\Windows\System32\WaaSMedicSvc.dll C:\Windows\System32\usosvc.dll C:\Windows\System32\wuaueng.dll
For example, the latest MacOS sequoia security update broke the touch id reader when logging in, i need to type my password now everytime. And lets not forget about the new glass design and UI changes in the latest iOS.
Im pretty tired of updates at this point and will push them out unless absolutely necessary.
Windows used to be about backwards compatibility. Microsoft was proud of it. Twenty year old software ran on it.
Now it is all about AI stuff that I do not give a fuck about.
As a systems guy by trade and now a security guy by role, that scares the every living fuck out of me.
The risk of not updating your desktop OS every week is vastly overstated, and I believe this is at least in part due to fear mongering by companies like Microsoft who use said fear as a tool to keep people on the latest version with the latest tracking and ads.
The first issue is you don't meaningfully control the timing (ie. defer until you have time to deal with any fallout, which may be >30 days), and that you can't manage your risk by reviewing what's in them and selectively picking the ones you want (ie. true security fixes with limited surface area to bork things).
Once upon a time both those things were easy (eg. meaningful descriptions) and under your control.
More to the point, I'd agree I'd love it if they had a widely available basic version and a separate version where they can chase the latest shiny object, but I can't see them being motivated to do that in the foreseeable future.
I've used Arch on both servers and on desktop for a few years, and the only issue I ever had was pacman breaking due to both signing and file conflicts. I also had this on Debian and Ubuntu, (apt just simply stopped working, and nothing I did would make it work), so it isn't unique to Arch.
I'm not being defensive of Arch, I just think a lot of folks think rolling release = bugs. For the ones that do have stuff break, they typically modify their environment with huge customizations that would break anything, including Debian, Ubuntu, Windows, or any other OS.
I'll report back if my CachyOS install ever breaks, however, the only reason I stopped using Arch prior to this was that I was playing a few games that didn't work. Now, they do, and I don't really play new games or games with anti-cheat, and all my other software (I'm a retired/disabled dev) works fine.
One problem that matches that behavior but is under-recognized, you might not have enough space in your Recovery partition.
If so this can be a showstopper you are expected to have your IT department on top of.
I wonder if this is related to what I experienced. After the update (update and shoutdown reliably updates and restarts again, does not shut down) a parctice of mine switching Control and Fn keys on my Mac so Control key function gets into the same physical position as Ctrl on the PC keyboard, so using Windwos through Microsoft Remote Desktop and at the keyboard of the Windows computer is a smoother switch, is not working anymore. Windows, through the Remote Desktop does not register the Fn key as Ctrl anymore. The whole thing does not make sense to me. The Remote Desktop software on Mac did not change, MacOS should send Remote Desktop the signal of Control key pressed when pressing Fn, the Windows update shall have no effect, yet the sole change here was the Windows update when this annoying thing emerged. I simply had no time to dive into diagnostics and find the underlying reason, it is less resource intensive and less painfull - but one more annoyance on top of the many concerning Windows use - learning to use different Ctrl button location on Mac and PC keyboard again (done before, before learning the Control <> Fn switch trick).
the update immediately prior to this broke password protected fileshares. Had to wait weeks for a patch to be deployed.
What's worse, is that so many similar problems have occured over the last 20 years is that when you try to search for the problem, you are highly likely to not find the actual cause+workaround, but will instead find one from years before that doesn't exactly apply to the current situation.