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
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.
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?
It does have tabs, you are probably just stuck on an old version because windows update broke.
The only feature that windows maybe kinda does better is the preview pane, but even then, it regularly loses certain file types and in the latest update it started taking 5 seconds or more just to render a text file.
The unresponsive thing is because the whole explorer.exe still seems to be one big single threaded process. One thing hanging kills everything. Including stuff completely unrelated to the file manager like the task bar. So weird.
Yep, close to regular browser tabs from my point of view. I don't know all the shortcuts, but the few that I used - CTRL+{T,W} - behaved like Chrome or Firefox.
> 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.
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.
With the dozen or so laptops I've switched over Linux, battery life is usually either much better or much worse. In the later case, some tinkering fixes it.
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.
Pretty cool and thanks for sharing. I went down a similar path at some point to try to be a "road warrior", but in the end I bit the bullet, learned nvim and went the tmux + nvim + ... route.
> 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.
> Now it is all about AI stuff that I do not give a fuck about.
Copilot is now a hardware key on the keyboard. The audacity, messing around with people's muscle memory just to push more slop.
Microsoft truly has gotten too large to exist and needs to be broken up finally and permanently. In fact that holds true for any company found to abuse their existing financial power to push through slop or other unprofitable shit to outcompete others by sheer user count.
That's the result of (maliciously) bundling security updates with feature upgrades. Security and feature updates should be entirely orthogonal, so that you can install security updates without affecting the functionality.
That is actually done for a reason. If you are old enough you'll understand why.
A combination of terrible antivirus software combined with really dumb ideas on the internet created a situation where a whole bunch of folks were disabling antivirus and other security features, which was leading to huge security issues across billions of devices. That, and malicious software figured out how to disable security measures as well, so Microsoft went nuclear and they do everything possible to reset things to defaults.
Of course, other teams saw this and Microsoft sometimes resets settings to things it unrelated to security, which just pisses everyone off.
Overall, they are doing a horrible job. They actually pushed me back onto Linux (likely for good, since all my software now works without compromises), and I've seen quite an uptick of folks who've done the same. Valve has made this easier by all their hard work getting games to "just work".
I'm under no illusion that Linux will gain significant market share overnight, however, things are shifting.
Maybe, but that is again not necessary. dpkg essentially shows you a three way merge, when you changed a setting which default has changed and asks you what you want to do.
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.
Honestly, people need to start delaying their updates if possible by roughly a month depending on their severity, much like the corporate world. Better to leave an update in the wild for a couple of weeks before updating your own machine.
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.
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.
I'm a really big windows expert. I've reverse engineered alot of it. Big fanboy, one of the most knowledgeable people about it. Ever since interviewing and declining a Microsoft position, it's clear the people their are absolute idiots. My first interview round as a C++/C kernel dev, was for a C# job? I passed and got the offer, then they send me for a systems admin role after I decline? From recruiters, to actual engineers there, the level of incompetence was insane. I will NEVER work or support this company in any way until they get rid of all the H1BSlop they have pushing these horrible updates. I think Apple and Meta are the only major tech companies not held up by velocity and actually have functional organizations. It's not a surprise seeing all of these bugs. And there's multiple bug reports i've submitted that go unsolved in their win32 or kernel API's. ESPECIALLY for new features. It's sad how they've fallen so much. If I can find these bugs in 5 minutes using IDA, how come they aren't catching it in code reviews?
Why haven't you reached out to the MS Kernel Core team? They have various ways to contact them. That would put you on the right course to the right team instead of the front door approach, assuming they are interested.
Honestly, I was working for the government and now work for a antivirus company where I work remote and make a very good wage and have an amazing WLB. Maybe once I have kids I will, but being a mid 30's bachelor where I am now is heaven.
The reason for the mismatch was the cleared positions are Azure, so was hoping for a position as a developer on the Defender product, but they don't really have that in the cleared space.
My home mini pc is having Bluetooth issues from last 6-7 months after some update. I can't go back, tried every possible solutions. Best option: wait for them to fix it.
The issue: Sometimes if the Windows boot normally, Bluetooth won't turn on. I have to force restart to have it on. My guess is it's trying to optimize the power or something. I gave up.
My other laptop and work computer are still Windows 10, so some sanity left. I have installed kubuntu on another spare laptop and slowing moving towards linux entirely.
I had the same bluetooth issue on windows 11. It stopped working. I didn't even have the option to see the bluetooth setting. All my peripherals stopped working and I had to bring out the cables. Then one day after a month or so it was fixed.
Perhaps try a clean Win11 install using latest updates on an external drive, to see if that fixes your Bluetooth. Sometimes Windows borks itself and everything needs to be reinstalled.
I was running Mint on a 256GB SATA SSD for about 6 months before finally just making the switch and moving it to my 2TB M.2 NVMe drive.
But I had to put my Windows install somewhere because some rare games like Battlefield 6 require onerous anticheat access at the kernel level and refuse to support Linux, so I moved it to my 256GB drive where Linux used to be.
I did that on Friday. And Windows corrupted itself on every boot. Eventually I gave up trying to make it work and shoved it onto a small partition on the end of my M.2 drive. The SSD is a bit older and has some errors on it but Linux worked just fine, but Windows couldn't handle the drive.
Reminded me of the meme about roses dying if the pH balance of the soil isn't perfect, but daisies are like "Fuck yeah, concrete!" growing in literal cracks in the sidewalk.
I wonder if my problems were related to them fucking with things, or if it's just a coincidence.
They got rid of most QA people, and nowadays apparently devs do QA as well, except that apparently not much of it, like in large majority of companies, where testing and docs come last.
Then there is the whole AI KPIs that most companies are pushing on their employees, and given CoPilot, they surely must be pushing a lot.
Switched? The Windows Insider has 3 different tiers for testers: Dev, Beta and Release preview and still update rollouts are an example of how not to do it
It's not like their customers have a choice. If software you depend on only works on Windows you can't just say I'm done with this circus, where is my Ubuntu stick. Seems like a massive gap for regulators to close as some might say Microsoft is abusing their privileged position. Though I wouldn't hold my hopes up. Given how they have penetrated many governments with their services and software, they might thread carefully before getting Microsoft to act decent (see inaction over sentencing millions of PCs to landfill - at odds with many countries environment policies, but most politicians keep their head in the sand).
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).
Some things are better than they've ever been, so there's some amount of rose-tinted glasses.
The thing is, I've been aware of the power of MacOS and especially Windows to alter my computing environment against my wishes under the threat of not being patched for a while, and it's something nobody else seems to care about even when I pointed it out.
As much as things are better on all operating systems (drivers aren't really a problem anymore, for example, and chargers are practically universal, and battery-life is glorious!)- there are things that are really shitty, and we ignore the solved problems. I'm now also feeling a huge amount of catharsis.
Microsoft is just completely pathetic, it's become completely opposite of what companies want and it wouldn't surprise me if it becomes politics soon to switch to Linux on office spaces.
office 365 is the only thing stopping people from switching to linux as the only current alternative is ironically chromeos (android office) and macos (fully supported by microsoft)
Most tasks are done OK with the web version of office365 tools and I know a few companies who do not bother to pay the licence to install the full suite to all their workers so that should make them easy to switch.
I think there is more to it: IT desktop admins mostly trained on the microsoft ecosystem, GPOs, etc.
> I think there is more to it: IT desktop admins mostly trained on the microsoft ecosystem, GPOs, etc.
Compliance checkboxes. That is the true strength of Microsoft - in 365 you are pretty much compliant with everything out of the box or you at least get the tools and reports to achieve compliance, and even the stuff where compliance is questionable (i.e. GDPR), no one will bother you as an individual company too much because any court would throw that charge out for being unreasonable.
"No one ever got fired for buying IBM" is just as valid today, it's just Microsoft. If you are a large company, there is virtually no alternative than the unholy triumvirate of Microsoft (Azure, AD, O365), SAP and Oracle (Java + DB) - deviating from that means lots of paperwork.
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
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.
> as good as Windows file explorer
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?
It does have tabs, you are probably just stuck on an old version because windows update broke.
The only feature that windows maybe kinda does better is the preview pane, but even then, it regularly loses certain file types and in the latest update it started taking 5 seconds or more just to render a text file.
Anyway, still doesn't come close to Dolphin.
The unresponsive thing is because the whole explorer.exe still seems to be one big single threaded process. One thing hanging kills everything. Including stuff completely unrelated to the file manager like the task bar. So weird.
Whenever something is weird about Windows, it's for backwards compatibility reason. There must be no way to keep win32 and rewrite explorer.exe.
> seems to be one big single threaded process
This option has existed since win2k IIRC:
Tools > Folder Options > View > Launch folder windows in a separate processed
fwiw Windows 11 Explorer does have tabs.
Oh is that new? I haven't noticed that yet. Is it obvious how to use it? How do you use it? (C-T, C-W, C-Shift-T, ...?)
Yep, close to regular browser tabs from my point of view. I don't know all the shortcuts, but the few that I used - CTRL+{T,W} - behaved like Chrome or Firefox.
I've been running tabs in file Explorer since windows 7. QtTabBar.
That's fine, it's a very subjective choice. Here a few reasons why I preferred Dolphin:
- 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.
> 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.
It depends on your definition of perfect.
For me the perfect file manager is Total Commander or Midnight Commander or Double Commadner.
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.
Not Windows Explorer; but I can't live without Total Commander.
check out directory opus - pretty much unmatched
> 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 is a wonderful piece of software, and works on more than just KDE! Most distros are supported, I believe.
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.
It's still limited by the features the OS supports. For example, on Windows you can't mount the phone's filesystem wirelessly.
Wow, you can mount the phone's filesystem wirelessly with it? That's just plain amazing!
If someone puts in the work, KDE Connect uses sshfs behind the scenes and sshfs is available for Windows. Don't know about licensing, though.
Ah Dolphin. Forced to use MacOS at work, most things do the job but man I miss Dolphin. I really wish I could run it on MacOS.
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.
You can build dolphin on macos using their Craft build tool. It works ok-ish.
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.
Are there any Linux laptops with very good (read: all day) battery life for software dev in an IDE?
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.
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.
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.
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...
Framework laptops are popular among Linux users
Most laptops can become 'Linux Laptops'. You just install Linux. Battery life is often similar.
With the dozen or so laptops I've switched over Linux, battery life is usually either much better or much worse. In the later case, some tinkering fixes it.
Can you share just what tinkering do you do on them?
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.
Pretty cool and thanks for sharing. I went down a similar path at some point to try to be a "road warrior", but in the end I bit the bullet, learned nvim and went the tmux + nvim + ... route.
However, another alternative to streaming the actual pixels from your home PC that doesn't confine you to the terminal would be use the built-in servers in some IDEs/editors (e.g. https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/vscode-server, https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/remote-development-start... ) and you simply make your IDE/editor point to it.
Double Commander is the best (actually Total Commander but that is for windows).
> 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.
AI is bad and therefore everything that is bad was made using AI.
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.
C:\Windows\System32\WaaSMedicSvc.dll C:\Windows\System32\usosvc.dll C:\Windows\System32\wuaueng.dll
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.
Yep the recent Windows update broke a videogame that I was playing.
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.
> Now it is all about AI stuff that I do not give a fuck about.
Copilot is now a hardware key on the keyboard. The audacity, messing around with people's muscle memory just to push more slop.
Microsoft truly has gotten too large to exist and needs to be broken up finally and permanently. In fact that holds true for any company found to abuse their existing financial power to push through slop or other unprofitable shit to outcompete others by sheer user count.
> Im pretty tired of updates at this point and will push them out unless absolutely necessary.
As a systems guy by trade and now a security guy by role, that scares the every living fuck out of me.
That's the result of (maliciously) bundling security updates with feature upgrades. Security and feature updates should be entirely orthogonal, so that you can install security updates without affecting the functionality.
...Or the fact that virtually all updates reset a lot of modifications done (incl. disable real-time antivirus nonsense)
That is actually done for a reason. If you are old enough you'll understand why.
A combination of terrible antivirus software combined with really dumb ideas on the internet created a situation where a whole bunch of folks were disabling antivirus and other security features, which was leading to huge security issues across billions of devices. That, and malicious software figured out how to disable security measures as well, so Microsoft went nuclear and they do everything possible to reset things to defaults.
Of course, other teams saw this and Microsoft sometimes resets settings to things it unrelated to security, which just pisses everyone off.
Overall, they are doing a horrible job. They actually pushed me back onto Linux (likely for good, since all my software now works without compromises), and I've seen quite an uptick of folks who've done the same. Valve has made this easier by all their hard work getting games to "just work".
I'm under no illusion that Linux will gain significant market share overnight, however, things are shifting.
Maybe, but that is again not necessary. dpkg essentially shows you a three way merge, when you changed a setting which default has changed and asks you what you want to do.
That is why desired state configuration should be used more between updates, but it isn't user friendly at all.
Same boat here, but I'm not surprised in the slightest.
I'd also argue that the inevitable fallout from large numbers of people making a similar decision is on Microsoft, not the individuals.
I'd rather use a non broken operating system than disable updates.
I pinned the system version on 23H2. It does get other updates still.
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!
Our update trust has been abused
> 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.
Honestly, people need to start delaying their updates if possible by roughly a month depending on their severity, much like the corporate world. Better to leave an update in the wild for a couple of weeks before updating your own machine.
At this point Arch Linux is more stable than Losedows 11.
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.
Windoesnt
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.
Some very bad regressions recently.
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.
I'm a really big windows expert. I've reverse engineered alot of it. Big fanboy, one of the most knowledgeable people about it. Ever since interviewing and declining a Microsoft position, it's clear the people their are absolute idiots. My first interview round as a C++/C kernel dev, was for a C# job? I passed and got the offer, then they send me for a systems admin role after I decline? From recruiters, to actual engineers there, the level of incompetence was insane. I will NEVER work or support this company in any way until they get rid of all the H1BSlop they have pushing these horrible updates. I think Apple and Meta are the only major tech companies not held up by velocity and actually have functional organizations. It's not a surprise seeing all of these bugs. And there's multiple bug reports i've submitted that go unsolved in their win32 or kernel API's. ESPECIALLY for new features. It's sad how they've fallen so much. If I can find these bugs in 5 minutes using IDA, how come they aren't catching it in code reviews?
Why haven't you reached out to the MS Kernel Core team? They have various ways to contact them. That would put you on the right course to the right team instead of the front door approach, assuming they are interested.
Honestly, I was working for the government and now work for a antivirus company where I work remote and make a very good wage and have an amazing WLB. Maybe once I have kids I will, but being a mid 30's bachelor where I am now is heaven.
The reason for the mismatch was the cleared positions are Azure, so was hoping for a position as a developer on the Defender product, but they don't really have that in the cleared space.
Windows 11 rant:
My home mini pc is having Bluetooth issues from last 6-7 months after some update. I can't go back, tried every possible solutions. Best option: wait for them to fix it.
The issue: Sometimes if the Windows boot normally, Bluetooth won't turn on. I have to force restart to have it on. My guess is it's trying to optimize the power or something. I gave up.
My other laptop and work computer are still Windows 10, so some sanity left. I have installed kubuntu on another spare laptop and slowing moving towards linux entirely.
I had the same bluetooth issue on windows 11. It stopped working. I didn't even have the option to see the bluetooth setting. All my peripherals stopped working and I had to bring out the cables. Then one day after a month or so it was fixed.
Perhaps try a clean Win11 install using latest updates on an external drive, to see if that fixes your Bluetooth. Sometimes Windows borks itself and everything needs to be reinstalled.
I was running Mint on a 256GB SATA SSD for about 6 months before finally just making the switch and moving it to my 2TB M.2 NVMe drive.
But I had to put my Windows install somewhere because some rare games like Battlefield 6 require onerous anticheat access at the kernel level and refuse to support Linux, so I moved it to my 256GB drive where Linux used to be.
I did that on Friday. And Windows corrupted itself on every boot. Eventually I gave up trying to make it work and shoved it onto a small partition on the end of my M.2 drive. The SSD is a bit older and has some errors on it but Linux worked just fine, but Windows couldn't handle the drive.
Reminded me of the meme about roses dying if the pH balance of the soil isn't perfect, but daisies are like "Fuck yeah, concrete!" growing in literal cracks in the sidewalk.
I wonder if my problems were related to them fucking with things, or if it's just a coincidence.
This is affecting me. I created a new Veeam Backup recovery USB and mouse and keyboard isn't working. Ridiculous how this got past testing.
Has Microsoft switched to vibe coding? Seems like the last series of blunders coincide with Coidiot rollout.
They got rid of most QA people, and nowadays apparently devs do QA as well, except that apparently not much of it, like in large majority of companies, where testing and docs come last.
Then there is the whole AI KPIs that most companies are pushing on their employees, and given CoPilot, they surely must be pushing a lot.
It's worth noting that QA change happened >10 years ago now. It's really the shift in focus that accelerated things recently.
Kind of, it has been slowly felt during Windows 10 and 11 time, especially in anything related to UWP and WinRT.
Closed tickets look better on KPI than re-opened ones
Switched? The Windows Insider has 3 different tiers for testers: Dev, Beta and Release preview and still update rollouts are an example of how not to do it
It's not like their customers have a choice. If software you depend on only works on Windows you can't just say I'm done with this circus, where is my Ubuntu stick. Seems like a massive gap for regulators to close as some might say Microsoft is abusing their privileged position. Though I wouldn't hold my hopes up. Given how they have penetrated many governments with their services and software, they might thread carefully before getting Microsoft to act decent (see inaction over sentencing millions of PCs to landfill - at odds with many countries environment policies, but most politicians keep their head in the sand).
eating their own dogfood
Keyboard troubles?!
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).
Whyis quality dropping like this between Windows and macOS? Is this asking this even just rose-tinted glasses on the past?
Some things are better than they've ever been, so there's some amount of rose-tinted glasses.
The thing is, I've been aware of the power of MacOS and especially Windows to alter my computing environment against my wishes under the threat of not being patched for a while, and it's something nobody else seems to care about even when I pointed it out.
As much as things are better on all operating systems (drivers aren't really a problem anymore, for example, and chargers are practically universal, and battery-life is glorious!)- there are things that are really shitty, and we ignore the solved problems. I'm now also feeling a huge amount of catharsis.
Linux, however, has genuinely never been better.
There's no business reason to keep the quality high. As long as the happy path works it's grand.
[dead]
Microsoft is just completely pathetic, it's become completely opposite of what companies want and it wouldn't surprise me if it becomes politics soon to switch to Linux on office spaces.
I see macOS growing in share for corporate laptops/desktops first, but it would be nice to see widespread Linux.
But for now, with big enterprise office requirement, macOS is the next best refuge for most companies.
office 365 is the only thing stopping people from switching to linux as the only current alternative is ironically chromeos (android office) and macos (fully supported by microsoft)
Most tasks are done OK with the web version of office365 tools and I know a few companies who do not bother to pay the licence to install the full suite to all their workers so that should make them easy to switch.
I think there is more to it: IT desktop admins mostly trained on the microsoft ecosystem, GPOs, etc.
> I think there is more to it: IT desktop admins mostly trained on the microsoft ecosystem, GPOs, etc.
Compliance checkboxes. That is the true strength of Microsoft - in 365 you are pretty much compliant with everything out of the box or you at least get the tools and reports to achieve compliance, and even the stuff where compliance is questionable (i.e. GDPR), no one will bother you as an individual company too much because any court would throw that charge out for being unreasonable.
"No one ever got fired for buying IBM" is just as valid today, it's just Microsoft. If you are a large company, there is virtually no alternative than the unholy triumvirate of Microsoft (Azure, AD, O365), SAP and Oracle (Java + DB) - deviating from that means lots of paperwork.
Office because lawyers send docs in .docx format like it was written in the blood of the Benjamin Franklin
DirectX because steam defacto runs on Windows only for the vast majority of games, and not everyone wants a steam deck form
I can't think of any other S tier use cases tbh
I'm 100% gaming on Fedora with proton and have been for quite awhile.
Playing Arc Raiders now on Linux just fine, and several other new games. Not BF6 though, that requires you to basically install a windows rootkit.
99% of Steam games work great on Linux now thanks to Proton. You might be thinking of how it was back in 2015.
[dead]
directx to vulkan works good enough these days, what breaks is DRM, anti-piracy and anticheats.
Drivers and such are still usually windows first.
Something in 25H2 breaks the "disable screen timeout" policy in intune as well.
Some machine was have need their screens on 24/7 it was working fine til 25H2 came along and nothing we tried seemed to fix it.
Edit: Oh an added to this is we have no policy allowing any machine to update to 25H2... yet somehow some machines did.
Just another day in the MS ecosystem
Vibe coding takes its first global victim