I have one old laptop with Windows 10 sitting around, and only because it's the only way to update the Xbox Series controller I have that randomly bootloops and thus is essentially useless anyway.
So this begs the question: how much of Windows can I delete and replace with foss stuff, while still having it technically be a Windows OS?
Soon:
"I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you’re referring to as Windows, is in fact, GNU/Windows/NT, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Windows plus NT. Windows is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another nonfree component of a fully functioning free GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX... and whatever NT does."
The absolutely most? ReactOS. It's not really suitable for daily use, but it is essentially a clean room reverse engineering project of Windows itself.
I think better questions to ask first might be things like "Can I pass the controller USB connection to windows in a VM?" which is probably yes, and "Can I just never update this controller?" which I would normally say is a yes, but it sounds like yours has issues.
Yeah after some searches it sounded like updating the controller might fix the bootloop issue. Running the accessories app for the controller through Linux seemed like a no-go, so for me the path of least resistance was putting Windows on an old laptop I don't generally use anymore.
Updating fixed the bootloop issue, until it didn't. The lesson I'm taking from all of this is to not buy Xbox controllers anymore. Currently the DualSense is my main, but I'm looking at the Gulikit ES Pro at some point.
If I ever find a controller that has a companion app that natively runs on Linux, that's what I will prefer. But really, controllers needing to be updated is dumb to begin with.
Yeah that controller might just have a hardware problem.
I've had pretty good luck with Xbox controllers from multiple generations, but it sounds like a LOT of people have problems with them. Even the elite controllers! It's a shame because their shape and layout work great for me, and I'm sure the same is true of other people with broken controllers and no spares.
Controllers needing to be updated is dumb in a way, sure. But as somebody who has worked in the design/manufacture/test of embedded electronics & software systems, I know the development of those dumb little accessories was a massive project, and there's so much potential for bugs or security issues down the line. After a quick search it looks like MS claims it was over $100 million in R&D for the xbone controller, and that's 15 years of inflation ago.
Back around the same time It was part of a $10M project at my job and that thing took over most of the damn company!
That is the unfortunate thing, it is clearly a very well designed controller. Even just the form factor - unlike any other controller I've had, the Xbox one has a just right feel to it. And it has by far the best dpad I've used (albeit loud).
Although I've always grown up with Sony controllers, so for me the ideal would be something like the Xbox controller, but with both analogs either on bottom or top (like the Wii U Pro controller).
(Someone on the interweb:) "Hey, you should try KDE Connect"
(Me:) Uh, I don't use Linux on my laptop and that's the computer that I use the most
(S:) "Well it also runs on Windows."
(Me:) Really?... Holy sh- HOLY SHIT, this is so much better than every shitty cloud sync package, and that Google app they keep renaming every time I look at it so I can't remember what it's called this week
Kde connect just really feels like it was made by someone who wanted to use it. Also just the fact that I can beam stuff between my desktop, phone, and steam deck is so nice
Especially the android app was made by someone who really wants to use it because it has literally no way of closing it or preventing it from auto-starting
I know this is the wrong place to say this, but I really like the Windows Explorer. Dolphin is a good replacement, but it would be one of the few things I'd like to keep on Linux.
I just updated to Windows 11 and oh boy has it gotten worse when compared to 10...
The UI, useless spacing in between items, 2nd context menu, gigantic bars on top, the somehow missing create folder button, OneDrive Integration, "Pin to quick access" everywhere, freezing up when creating thumbnails, constantly somehow resetting the layout of the user home and I'm just getting started...
But hey it got tabs now
I was a win10 user because I was forced to update from 7. So I got really annoyed when I saw the new context menu for dumdums. It's useless.
If I ever need to install windows 11, either on a virtual machine or for a family member, I run a script that returns the old context menu (and several others that remove a bunch of bloat and de-activate internet search on the searchbar)
Microsoft has been doing the most to break those. I was using PatchExplorer which has a lot of these features. Microsoft broke the ability to completely remove that awful, wasted space for “Recommended” in the Start Menu. It’s absolutely useless and an eyesore.
But it at least still worked to revert the context menu to what it should be. I hate always having to figure out what icon is for copy/paste/delete than just having the damn word and also having to go to the old context for 7zip/other third party apps.
Ohh not totally for dumdums. The design of the old context menu is one of Explorer's greatest weaknesses.
When you right click that menu, every context application DLL listed in the registry needs to load. So if you have an end user with a bunch of context apps. mp3tag, smartrename,scan for viruses or even worse some dll that needs a network resource to init. that context menu can take 5-10 seconds to load on an old encumbered system.
9/10 they just want to right click and open with or rename, so there's a cheap menu with no dll loading and an option to load them anyway.
I feel you, I set my win11 desktop to show the old style too, but the idea behind it isn't bad.
Wouldn't the better idea have been to load specific DLLs on activation of a function then? Dicking over users that know how to use their OS for the sake of digital slobs seems unfair.
Microsoft messed up File Explorer tabs. If you make a new tab, start a search, the close the tab before the search finishes, you break the URL/path bar text. You cannot see what directory you are in unless you click the path bar. The only way to fix it is you restart the application.
Also that right click menu is lighters faster than the old school menu. Every application and their mother wants to add shit to the right click menu and it would lag out to the point it would take 10 seconds to open. The new one doesn’t have that issue anymore.
Uh... The new one literally takes a couple of seconds to remember that OneDrive and Notepad++ exist when I use it on my work PC, all while entries towards the bottom keep shifting around.
Might be, tbh. I never noticed it on my Surface, which has OneDrive disabled, but I used that one was less. Or maybe it's some other garbage on the corporate laptop causing issues (like Trellix).
It still has the old annoying bug where the entire explorer.exe crashes if your mouse cursor gets anywhere near a network drive that can't be reached. Accidentally hover over its icon in the left sidebar, and explorer just freezes up unrecoverably. I guess the technology to safely handle hovering over the icon of a disconnected drive is just not there yet.
I have honestly no idea how microsoft still hasn't fixed that issue. Granted I've never had it crash from waiting for a directory to respond, it just waits the full 1 minute for the packet to die before coming back.
Also can't say I've had it happen for stuff pinned to the side bar, only when typing it in, or clicking on a mapped directory on the "this pc"
Also that right click menu is lighters faster than the old school menu. Every application and their mother wants to add shit to the right click menu and it would lag out to the point it would take 10 seconds to open.
if you don't install all the garbage of the internet, that's not a problem. it can also be cleaned up, even without regedit.
if you don’t install all the garbage of the internet, that’s not a problem. it can also be cleaned up, even without regedit.
I rather like having the context there in the submenu. it's one more click. but it's fast, and I don't need to tag this mp3 every time I right click->open with, but I do miss it if I don't have that option anywhere. And they made it optional.
At least on linux you have the choice. Somehow however, it seems so many people like to recreate or even worsen the windows experience. I guess Unixporn didn’t make it to lemmy, but half of those did not feel usable. Why would I want one inch wide gaps between everything?
like? I fing love Vim. It's like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich made of sunk cost fallacy and Stockholm syndrome.
I've spent years using it, so I know every (reasonable) key combination and don't need my mouse* to wiz around even very large documents. It's on every pc/server I use by default, it's on my phone. I can run it on a server from a console window with no window manager.
I get there's a lot not to like, but it's like 10% of my DevOPS superpower.
Okay, I'm generally on the side if dolphin UI-wise, but when it comes to the topic of lagginess, it has to be said that dolphin, and in fact, almost everything using the kio infrastructure, is the one shitting the bed here. You'd think a bit of multithreading will keep the UI from freezing up whenever the underlying I/O has some minor hiccup (which can absolutely happen in practice with network filesystems or USB sticks in combination with large file transfers), but apparently dolphin can't do that.
It lags for me whenever I access some filesystem that takes a while to respond. That could be a faulty or old device, or it could be an NFS share with multiple large file transfers going on in the background.
And when I say it lags, I don't mean it just takes a while to show me a directory's content, I mean the entire UI freezes and kwin will grey out the window because tha application isn't responding any more.
This does not happen a lot, and if your file browsing is largely limited to a fast local storage, like a SATA SSD or even an NVMe, you may well never see this problem at all. But it does happen.
Admittedly I use an NVMe drive but I've never had this happen once in the years I've been using KDE. Dolphin is so much snappier than Windows Explorer on the same hardware that it's almost funny.
On the context menu: I've been using Nilesoft Shell for a few years now and it's been wonderful. It's got all the options from Windows 10 plus a few more in the Windows 11 style.
The primary differences between Dolphin and Explorer are mainly in speed and the context menus for applications. (which is the reason explorer is more encumbered)
Since I use context menus on my windows admin workstation, I wouldn't want dolphin there and I sure as hell don't want explorer in my NixOS.
Sometimes I need to re-pair, but generally it works for me as long as my phone is on wifi. Or bluetooth? I think I had that working alongside a VPN but it was touchy.
Mine works when both my phone and computer are on the same VPN server. Weirdly, my sister doesn't have a VPN, and her phone and computer are on the same network, but hers only works with Bluetooth.
NGL, I didn't realise it's an actual Dolphin icon on the folder until I saw this post. I always have the Dolphin pinned on my taskbar but it's
teeny tiny so I couldn't make out the symbol.
I'm going to try to get Dolphin through security review at my company. QUICK everyone start listing reasons why my company should take on the risk of installing Dolphin.
Prepare a feasibility study on the merits on giving choice to power users without sacrificing security or increasing complexity. A multi departmental working group should be established to review the merits of the new platform, while a control group should also be established to monitor how existing solutions perform.
Once completed a multi stage rollout plan should be compiled by a different multi departmental group to make sure all workflows are covered in the new system.
I have been down that path before with Obsidian and LaTeX (Obsidian was a success and LaTeX was meh). The first step is getting the executables white listed and Its always a PITA with our security team. I need to first convince them it is worth the study, which is always hard because they are not power users. Feature lists help. Win11 explorer being dogshit also helps.
Does it have a weird name starting with K, or have a C replaced with a K? Most likely a KDE app. (I always thought Krita was a play on Critter. Turns out it's Swedish)
Does it have a weird name starting with G? Gnome.
Then there's Gwenview, which was ported to QT and adopted by KDE, but was never renamed...
I kinda dislike Dolphin, but I also know it's very customizable and haven't dig into the options, so it's possible there's a version of it I like that I haven't found yet. If that makes sense.
Same. I try it every now and then and am constantly blown away with how it just seems to know my system and auto mounts things, and knows how to thumbnail images and videos without being nudged....
...but I just can't get over the clean glossy UI. It makes my whole system feel like a web app.
And thus I always go back to Thunar or Dired because apparently cavemen just like to bang rocks rogether and that's okay
Looks nice, starred it so I might remember when I get the parts for my ThinkPad that (hopefully) will resurrect it (no screen, no booting, beeps that either indicate "motherboard failure", or "failure of some other kind), CPU temperature control seems to work at least, one of the worst coil whine that seems to be temperature dependent -> this indicates me some kind of capacitor failure).
Yeah it's a real bummer that Foobar2000 doesn't run natively on Linux, but I've heard it runs well through WINE. The same can't be said of MusicBee though, which even WINE can't get running smoothly on Linux. Honestly, MusicBee and Exact Audio Copy are the only pieces of Windows software I've yet to find a native Linux alternative for that I'm satisfied with.
Edit: Apparently nowadays MusicBee runs better through WINE than it used to? I'll have to try it out.
No worries! I never found a true alternative to MusicBee, and there are several outdated tutorials about getting it run on Wine that technically work but leave you with a buggy app. The method I showed you works perfectly.
I have to use windows for work, and Windows Explorer annoys the everloving hell out of me.
What idiot thought that the "Home" folder and the User folder should be the different?
And regularly, when "Home" hasn't loaded I'm halfway done typing the address in the address bar "//someletters/adv" for example, it will decide to clear it to let me know I'm "Home"
You might have made my life just a little bit easier.
Another annoying one is that the address bar obfuscates the folder path if you start at Documents, Photos, etc. If I want to get to my user folder without a shortcut, it makes sense to hop to Documents and go up a level, but up a level from Documents is the useless Home directory.
IT admins (and those involved in a company's security) should be fired for deploying under-configured or misconfigured Windows installations on computers.
Microsoft in general should be fired from computers - their security is absolute garbage.
IT admins (and those involved in a company’s security) should be fired for deploying under-configured or misconfigured Windows installations on computers.
I kinda want to see you argue this one. With pop-corn.
There is a high skill level needed to configure Windows properly in enterprise settings. Regardless, I wouldn't be working for an organization that trusts any Microsoft software.
Keep your popcorn ready though, it's only a matter of time before Microsoft loses the security battle - unless Microsoft makes gigantic strides in a more sustainable direction.
While I don't think people should bypass work restrictions either, I get the frustration. One job I was at had some setting forcing browsers to always close tabs on close and reopen the homepage on open which was the intranet landing page. It was a pain.
Never said I would, but if I can install it on my work desktop via the Microsoft Store without the need of administration privileges then what’s the harm?
KDE has a proven track record and I’ve already got KDE connect on my work desktop to send files from my phone to the desktop without any issues from up top, plus I’ve spoken with my IT & Managers and got the ok for a Linux distro, but they do make the point of “what if someone else uses your computer” which is fair and is why I’m hesitant for them to switch me to a Linux work station, was thinking dual booting but not sure due to Windows history of wiping EFi boot partitions.
My environment is very much mixed in with shop workers, fitters or welders sit and eat lunch at people’s desk on their breaks, my desk is a common one as I’ve gone in on overtime shifts with people using my desk phone.
I used to work a food service job that had computerized touchscreen scales for weighing out products and printing out labels for them.
I learned that particular model was running an OS vaguely labeled as "Linux", and it was on an ARM-based system. My biggest regret in that job was abstaining from trying to get Doom running on it.
spent almost a decade straight on Win10 LTSC then switched to regular Win11 - I think Microsoft forgot how to make software. Vanilla edition is so bloated it is scary. Considering embracing Ubuntu.
Ubuntu is falling behind in the desktop experience, as well as their insistence of using their proprietary backend for snaps over flatpaks, and overriding tools that you expect to get the flatpaks and causing trouble shooting issues because you are expecting one behavior but getting another (not that hard to work around or translate once you know, but still a hassle.
Also, Mint and PopOS! are just great experiences and were top contenders for my personal desktop (dev, gaming, power user) switch from Win10 -> Linux. I wound up going with Arch/Garuda because it's forcing me to learn far more about Nix than I've learned as a dev. I still might make the switch since Garuda can become unstable occasionally due to the way that the OS is "bleeding edge", and forces me to troubleshoot the causes (I guess this is what I wanted to learn?) instead of doing personal dev, gaming, or desktop entertainment.
I recommend Mint. It's basically ubuntu with the controversial stuff disabled (Canonical's snaps mostly, but I guess also any ads for their pro services) and with an extra layer of polish.
I'm happy with it for both the "I want something that works reliably" reasons and the "I'm an engineer who wants a free system that I can control and modify" reasons.
The thing that really annoys me with Linux file explorers is that none of them have a "sort by extension". They have sort by type, but it'll mix .jpg, .png, .gif and .webp together, for instance.
I just checked and Dolphin very much has that feature, the wording in English might not be exactly the same as I have the UI in my native language but I found it in the hamburger menu under Sort by>Other>File extension.
Well, apparently that is a thing in Dolphin, but if what you actually want is e.g. to just move all .png files, then I prefer to use the Filter bar (Ctrl+i or the fourth entry in the hamburger menu). You can just type ".png" into it and then it hides all entries which don't contain that substring.
I dunno, on GNOME49 it seems to me like Nautilus is doing it by file extension. Like yeah, it's still type, but it's sorting the extensions alphabetically. There's also an extra column for "Detailed Type."
But I used to be a long time Total/Double Commander user on Windows Vista & 7. But sometime after I switched to Windows 10 it stopped letting me change the default file manager to anything other than explorer...
I use the split panel feature in dolphin a lot. the shortcut is F3 if you didn't know already.
Great! Dolphin is also better than macOS Finder. I would replace it with Dolphin as well.
However, Windows Explorer in Windows 11 still excels in one area: it doesn't have a header, and the tabs are displayed on the header, like in Chromium.
the most recent version of Finder is... a bit weird. I like all of the tools and functions it has, but it's a huge departure from the previous version of Finder, and I'm not a super-fan of some of the feature implementations. but, if you're used to using Finder for a lot of work, you won't feel too out-of-place.
I haven't used Dolphin in over a decade, so perhaps I'll check it out.
Closest thing I found was adding a close button directly on the toolbar. No min/max buttons available unfortunately. Or you csn use a specific window decoration with a locally integrated menu: github.com/Zren/material-decor…
I like Thunar better. There was something really minor about Dolphin I didn't like. Maybe it was the way it handled tags or something, I can't remember anymore.
Although, the only reason I use it is because when i made the switch many moons ago, i was following this guy's tutorial on setting up i3 and he recommended thunar. Never looked back (although, at this point i think its more about the ui than any functional difference)
I actually like the Windows file explorer. Used to be my favorite, before Dolphin. Nowadays I'd say Dolphin is slightly better overall, but could still use a change inspired by Windows or two. For instance, I really like the drive view on the Windows file explorer's home page.
In the newest versions, idk about older ones, dolphin lists all attached drives with a progress bar to show how full they are on the left panel, not too different from what youre suggesting, just built into the sidebar instead of a "my computer" type page.
It's nice, but I just really like the Windows' design of this feature. Not really anything functionality-related. Honestly, I wish I could just have the file manager from Windows Vista or 7. I don't even need tabs.
I have! But.. Well, call me newfangled, but I couldn't really get used to not being able to use the mouse to drag and drop stuff to other programs.
I like using the keyboard, but I do use it in combination with the mouse, not exclusively. I don't have the memory for keyboard shortcuts, for one... Especially for stuff I don't do on the regular.
double commander had a weird issue where the window size wouldn't change properly and display solid color in resized area on my system for some reason :/
gentoo, worker and xfe all seemed to be pretty good, but i haven't really tried them much. mc usually works well enough.
People love complaining about some random obscure feature only they and 4 others use being """hidden""" in Dolphin which usually just means it's not a default button taking up half the UI, but can be added in ten seconds by using the toolbar customization features.
Oooh, since we're talking about Dolphin- today I had to organize image files on an Android device, and connected it to my pc via usb to do it. I noticed Dolphin did not use image thumbnails as the file icons like it normally does on local image files. Is there a way to make it do that on externally connected devices?
In Dolpin settings, under Interface > Previews, there's an option for previews from remote storage. Not sure if it applies to connected devices or just network drives though.
I don't know how much of this is going on now, but in the early days, one could run a variety of linux apps in windows with the correct runtimes installed. this may be how WINE came about?
Just FYI, WINE is for running MS Windows software on Linux, not Linux software on MS Windows^1. As others have mentioned, I think cygwin was sort of the reverse-WINE. Also, I think KDE made a push to get their apps running on MS Windows because QT was cross-platform.
I was using WINE to play StarCraft back in like 2000. I think it predates running most Linux software on MS Windows, except for a few big, multi-platform packages like Firefox (back when it was still Netscape, then Mozilla Suite (don't remember what it was called), then Phoenix, then Firebird (right? the same name as a database, so they had to change it, iirc). Those were usually developed for each platform specifically, not just for Linux and then run with an emulator.
^1: not trying to be snarky or anything. just put it in in case you didn't know or maybe had a brain fart. Or maybe I'm wrong about the origins of WINE.
You’re thinking of remote X server, but there was also something called Cygwin that allowed you to run certain Linux apps within a virtualized environment. It was basically just an X window that opened up in windows inside of which you could run Linux apps.
Good news is I could install this without admin priveleges at work. Bad news is that while it can see my onedrive folder it behaves very badly with onedrive, click on a folder and it just dissappears. It did the same thing with Google drive as well. Since cloud is where all my data lives it's not usable currently. =(
not at all. QT/KDE app. the size is probably due to bundling of QT and KDE framework libraries because usually windows installations doesn't come with system versions of those. it's like flatpak KDE runtime.
That's because of Qt and the KDE frameworks. ...Sorry those are a necessity! Though, if you installed other KDE apps now, they'd be like, 80 MiB per app!
Can recommend, Dolphin makes life on windows slightly more tolerable. Kate for Windows is also amazing
I use Kate on my Mac now. I'll never go back to regular ol' TextEdit.
I love Dolphin. Great for GameCube and Wii games.
is this a /j
could be, or not, we will never know for sure
either way, it is funny
ComOP is joking about this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolphin_(emulator)
I thought the same thing when I saw the comic.
I know about the GameCube/Wii emulator, but I wasn't sure if they knew Dolphin File Manager exists.
I have one old laptop with Windows 10 sitting around, and only because it's the only way to update the Xbox Series controller I have that randomly bootloops and thus is essentially useless anyway.
So this begs the question: how much of Windows can I delete and replace with foss stuff, while still having it technically be a Windows OS?
Soon:
You mean GNU\Windows\NT
Backslashes in file paths makes me go 🔥😡🤬😤😾💥
The absolutely most? ReactOS. It's not really suitable for daily use, but it is essentially a clean room reverse engineering project of Windows itself.
That is cool as heck! I've got some reading to do.
Yeah I check in on React OS every few months. Maybe someday I'll give it a try, but it's still so much in alpha status.
https://github.com/TibixDev/winboat
Sounds more like Winbloat. >_>
😢
That's just running a full fat installation of Windows.
I think better questions to ask first might be things like "Can I pass the controller USB connection to windows in a VM?" which is probably yes, and "Can I just never update this controller?" which I would normally say is a yes, but it sounds like yours has issues.
Yeah after some searches it sounded like updating the controller might fix the bootloop issue. Running the accessories app for the controller through Linux seemed like a no-go, so for me the path of least resistance was putting Windows on an old laptop I don't generally use anymore.
Updating fixed the bootloop issue, until it didn't. The lesson I'm taking from all of this is to not buy Xbox controllers anymore. Currently the DualSense is my main, but I'm looking at the Gulikit ES Pro at some point.
If I ever find a controller that has a companion app that natively runs on Linux, that's what I will prefer. But really, controllers needing to be updated is dumb to begin with.
Yeah that controller might just have a hardware problem.
I've had pretty good luck with Xbox controllers from multiple generations, but it sounds like a LOT of people have problems with them. Even the elite controllers! It's a shame because their shape and layout work great for me, and I'm sure the same is true of other people with broken controllers and no spares.
Controllers needing to be updated is dumb in a way, sure. But as somebody who has worked in the design/manufacture/test of embedded electronics & software systems, I know the development of those dumb little accessories was a massive project, and there's so much potential for bugs or security issues down the line. After a quick search it looks like MS claims it was over $100 million in R&D for the xbone controller, and that's 15 years of inflation ago.
Back around the same time It was part of a $10M project at my job and that thing took over most of the damn company!
That is the unfortunate thing, it is clearly a very well designed controller. Even just the form factor - unlike any other controller I've had, the Xbox one has a just right feel to it. And it has by far the best dpad I've used (albeit loud).
Although I've always grown up with Sony controllers, so for me the ideal would be something like the Xbox controller, but with both analogs either on bottom or top (like the Wii U Pro controller).
(Someone on the interweb:) "Hey, you should try KDE Connect"
(Me:) Uh, I don't use Linux on my laptop and that's the computer that I use the most
(S:) "Well it also runs on Windows."
(Me:) Really?... Holy sh- HOLY SHIT, this is so much better than every shitty cloud sync package, and that Google app they keep renaming every time I look at it so I can't remember what it's called this week
Kde connect just really feels like it was made by someone who wanted to use it. Also just the fact that I can beam stuff between my desktop, phone, and steam deck is so nice
Especially the android app was made by someone who really wants to use it because it has literally no way of closing it or preventing it from auto-starting
FOSS >> properitary🤮
proprietary shit is never as intercompatible as foss
I know this is the wrong place to say this, but I really like the Windows Explorer. Dolphin is a good replacement, but it would be one of the few things I'd like to keep on Linux.
I just updated to Windows 11 and oh boy has it gotten worse when compared to 10...
The UI, useless spacing in between items, 2nd context menu, gigantic bars on top, the somehow missing create folder button, OneDrive Integration, "Pin to quick access" everywhere, freezing up when creating thumbnails, constantly somehow resetting the layout of the user home and I'm just getting started... But hey it got tabs now
I was a win10 user because I was forced to update from 7. So I got really annoyed when I saw the new context menu for dumdums. It's useless.
If I ever need to install windows 11, either on a virtual machine or for a family member, I run a script that returns the old context menu (and several others that remove a bunch of bloat and de-activate internet search on the searchbar)
Microsoft has been doing the most to break those. I was using PatchExplorer which has a lot of these features. Microsoft broke the ability to completely remove that awful, wasted space for “Recommended” in the Start Menu. It’s absolutely useless and an eyesore.
But it at least still worked to revert the context menu to what it should be. I hate always having to figure out what icon is for copy/paste/delete than just having the damn word and also having to go to the old context for 7zip/other third party apps.
Its because the recommended is literally ads. Microsoft is putting ads on the start menu. If that cant get someone to switch to Linux, nothing can
Yep, that’s exactly what I realized too and why they’re hellbent on it being there.
I am no longer using Windows at home except a server I’m working on moving to Linux and it’s partly because of this. I’ve given up on Windows.
Ohh not totally for dumdums. The design of the old context menu is one of Explorer's greatest weaknesses.
When you right click that menu, every context application DLL listed in the registry needs to load. So if you have an end user with a bunch of context apps. mp3tag, smartrename,scan for viruses or even worse some dll that needs a network resource to init. that context menu can take 5-10 seconds to load on an old encumbered system.
9/10 they just want to right click and open with or rename, so there's a cheap menu with no dll loading and an option to load them anyway.
I feel you, I set my win11 desktop to show the old style too, but the idea behind it isn't bad.
Wouldn't the better idea have been to load specific DLLs on activation of a function then? Dicking over users that know how to use their OS for the sake of digital slobs seems unfair.
There's a million different design problems in all of Windows. There's probably a million better ways to fix the problem.
I'm just saying that what they did isn't without merit. And they did leave you the option to turn it off.
I use Windows 10 with OpenShell so I can turn it into Windows 7. I definitely will never use windows 11 hahaha
Microsoft messed up File Explorer tabs. If you make a new tab, start a search, the close the tab before the search finishes, you break the URL/path bar text. You cannot see what directory you are in unless you click the path bar. The only way to fix it is you restart the application.
There's also this on Windows
https://github.com/files-community/Files
Although it seemed to freeze up from time to time back when I was on windows
Explorer on windows 11 has gotten better in a lot of ways and only worse in a few.
Feel free to name them...
Tabs? That’s pretty major.
Also that right click menu is lighters faster than the old school menu. Every application and their mother wants to add shit to the right click menu and it would lag out to the point it would take 10 seconds to open. The new one doesn’t have that issue anymore.
Uh... The new one literally takes a couple of seconds to remember that OneDrive and Notepad++ exist when I use it on my work PC, all while entries towards the bottom keep shifting around.
It's completely unusable.
Fast on my machine even with NP++. It did slow it down a smidge though when 4 things got added.
Maybe it's just OneDrive being a piece of shit? I don't have it in my right click menu for some raisin.
Might be, tbh. I never noticed it on my Surface, which has OneDrive disabled, but I used that one was less. Or maybe it's some other garbage on the corporate laptop causing issues (like Trellix).
Now you made me want to investigate.
It still has the old annoying bug where the entire explorer.exe crashes if your mouse cursor gets anywhere near a network drive that can't be reached. Accidentally hover over its icon in the left sidebar, and explorer just freezes up unrecoverably. I guess the technology to safely handle hovering over the icon of a disconnected drive is just not there yet.
I have honestly no idea how microsoft still hasn't fixed that issue. Granted I've never had it crash from waiting for a directory to respond, it just waits the full 1 minute for the packet to die before coming back.
Also can't say I've had it happen for stuff pinned to the side bar, only when typing it in, or clicking on a mapped directory on the "this pc"
if you don't install all the garbage of the internet, that's not a problem. it can also be cleaned up, even without regedit.
I rather like having the context there in the submenu. it's one more click. but it's fast, and I don't need to tag this mp3 every time I right click->open with, but I do miss it if I don't have that option anywhere. And they made it optional.
Split view, tabs, drag and drop to the addressbar. The ui looks cleaner compared to win 10.
Negative is that one drive got even more embedded and they fucked up the right click menu.
oh... now I understand everything
At least on linux you have the choice. Somehow however, it seems so many people like to recreate or even worsen the windows experience. I guess Unixporn didn’t make it to lemmy, but half of those did not feel usable. Why would I want one inch wide gaps between everything?
Don't forget that they still lie about file sizes (displaying GiB but saying its GB)
GET THE TORCHES AND PITCHFORKS!!!
I wouldn't say like, I just don't know how to quit it.
https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/linux-unix/how-to-exit-vim/
And here I've just been shutting the power off for years!
(That's on me, I should have put a /s by my pun above)
I like vim and emacs, but I also agree so I'm not sure how to feel
like? I fing love Vim. It's like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich made of sunk cost fallacy and Stockholm syndrome.
I've spent years using it, so I know every (reasonable) key combination and don't need my mouse* to wiz around even very large documents. It's on every pc/server I use by default, it's on my phone. I can run it on a server from a console window with no window manager.
I get there's a lot not to like, but it's like 10% of my DevOPS superpower.
It is admittedly not the best IDE for your computer.
But... Why? It's just a mediocre and laggy copy of Dolphin.
Okay, I'm generally on the side if dolphin UI-wise, but when it comes to the topic of lagginess, it has to be said that dolphin, and in fact, almost everything using the kio infrastructure, is the one shitting the bed here. You'd think a bit of multithreading will keep the UI from freezing up whenever the underlying I/O has some minor hiccup (which can absolutely happen in practice with network filesystems or USB sticks in combination with large file transfers), but apparently dolphin can't do that.
Dolphin doesn't lag for me
It lags for me whenever I access some filesystem that takes a while to respond. That could be a faulty or old device, or it could be an NFS share with multiple large file transfers going on in the background.
And when I say it lags, I don't mean it just takes a while to show me a directory's content, I mean the entire UI freezes and kwin will grey out the window because tha application isn't responding any more.
This does not happen a lot, and if your file browsing is largely limited to a fast local storage, like a SATA SSD or even an NVMe, you may well never see this problem at all. But it does happen.
Admittedly I use an NVMe drive but I've never had this happen once in the years I've been using KDE. Dolphin is so much snappier than Windows Explorer on the same hardware that it's almost funny.
Yeah, slow network mounts, especially rclone mounts, are typical examples of this.
ever tried PCManFM? I use that and it feels like the old Windows Explorer.
If it wasn’t for the bugs I’d whole heartedly love windows 11s explorer over 10s.
But if explorer stops responding me my interactions one more time I’m going to commit a crime.
Seconded.
There's a lot of reasons to hate Microsoft. There's a lot of reasons to hate Windows 11.
Their explorer is't one of them. The new context menus when you right click anywhere is, sure. But explorer and notepad got righteous upgrades.
On the context menu: I've been using Nilesoft Shell for a few years now and it's been wonderful. It's got all the options from Windows 10 plus a few more in the Windows 11 style.
Edit: wrong link, fixed
Yikes
The primary differences between Dolphin and Explorer are mainly in speed and the context menus for applications. (which is the reason explorer is more encumbered)
Since I use context menus on my windows admin workstation, I wouldn't want dolphin there and I sure as hell don't want explorer in my NixOS.
I would say Windows makes the dolphin experience unusable compared to file explorer
I was like wait this is so cool then I realized I'm on Linux already
Also filelight and kde connect.
kde connect works for you? none of my devices finds each other anymore, but they used to. thought they screwed something up in an update
Sometimes I need to re-pair, but generally it works for me as long as my phone is on wifi. Or bluetooth? I think I had that working alongside a VPN but it was touchy.
Mine works when both my phone and computer are on the same VPN server. Weirdly, my sister doesn't have a VPN, and her phone and computer are on the same network, but hers only works with Bluetooth.
Probably firewall, do you use eset or something?
nope, literally haven't touched anything
Hmmm hope you find it
I'm not on windows personally.
My desktop and mobile devices connect but the desktop doesn't connect to my laptop anymore
I used to be able to use shared clipboard, but it doesn't work for me anymore :(
So much kde stuff works on windows. Its a lifesaver
Just need windows to allow different desktops.
And to run on top of the linux kernel
Like, virtual desktops/workspaces?
That's a thing. Press windows key + tab.
No like run kde or gnome on windows i guess I’m trying to say, different desktop environments.
NGL, I didn't realise it's an actual Dolphin icon on the folder until I saw this post. I always have the Dolphin pinned on my taskbar but it's teeny tiny so I couldn't make out the symbol.
For what it's worth, the dolphin face is a relatively recent addition. I wanna say three months tops.
Does anyone else remember when you could replace windows ui entirely with plasma or did I hallucinate that memory
One of my favorite creators, MichaelMJD made a Video about this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVXMcrRANC8
I used to run blackbox on windows xp. It worked really well too.
When I look up "Dolphin windows" I just get the wii emulator (I am clueless)
https://apps.kde.org/platforms/windows/
Halfway down the page.
I'm going to try to get Dolphin through security review at my company. QUICK everyone start listing reasons why my company should take on the risk of installing Dolphin.
You don't try company wide.
Prepare a feasibility study on the merits on giving choice to power users without sacrificing security or increasing complexity. A multi departmental working group should be established to review the merits of the new platform, while a control group should also be established to monitor how existing solutions perform.
Once completed a multi stage rollout plan should be compiled by a different multi departmental group to make sure all workflows are covered in the new system.
One million years later: "The study has been inconclusive."
This guy corporates
I have been down that path before with Obsidian and LaTeX (Obsidian was a success and LaTeX was meh). The first step is getting the executables white listed and Its always a PITA with our security team. I need to first convince them it is worth the study, which is always hard because they are not power users. Feature lists help. Win11 explorer being dogshit also helps.
the only reason to avoid dolphin is if your shell is fish
My shell is DOS. :(
Kde.org/apps
You can run lots of kde apps on Windows and Mac OS. I personally use Kate at work since it is far faster than VScode
There even is a konsole port in the works
Okular is the best PDF software for Windows, beating Adobe's own solution.
That is a pretty low bar.
Okular is ok, but I dream of macOS Preview on Linux. About the only thing it can't do is edit a PDF.
wait, KRITA IS KDE?!?!? i've been using it for so long how did i not know that
Does it have a weird name starting with K, or have a C replaced with a K? Most likely a KDE app. (I always thought Krita was a play on Critter. Turns out it's Swedish)
Does it have a weird name starting with G? Gnome.
Then there's Gwenview, which was ported to QT and adopted by KDE, but was never renamed...
Let's all just start calling it Kwenview
There's also Gcompris to break the rules
honestly i never thought a lot about the name so i just accepted it
All my homies love Kate.
Kate's a lot better than Karen
We wanna be Kate!
Kate is wonderful
Installing this as well on my work laptop, I do frequently get part way through typing kate then remember it's notepad++
I prefer Geany 🧞♀️
Lighter and faster
I kinda dislike Dolphin, but I also know it's very customizable and haven't dig into the options, so it's possible there's a version of it I like that I haven't found yet. If that makes sense.
Same. I try it every now and then and am constantly blown away with how it just seems to know my system and auto mounts things, and knows how to thumbnail images and videos without being nudged....
...but I just can't get over the clean glossy UI. It makes my whole system feel like a web app.
And thus I always go back to Thunar or Dired because apparently cavemen just like to bang rocks rogether and that's okay
Yeah, I miss Windows Explorer. Which I find really shocking. But I think it's just missing the accumulated years of muscle memory.
Dolphin is the best file manager of all time. Both linux and windows.
Foobar2000 Linux version when?
What about Fooyin?
Looks nice, starred it so I might remember when I get the parts for my ThinkPad that (hopefully) will resurrect it (no screen, no booting, beeps that either indicate "motherboard failure", or "failure of some other kind), CPU temperature control seems to work at least, one of the worst coil whine that seems to be temperature dependent -> this indicates me some kind of capacitor failure).
Foobar2000 is the GOAT!
Yeah it's a real bummer that Foobar2000 doesn't run natively on Linux, but I've heard it runs well through WINE.
The same can't be said of MusicBee though, which even WINE can't get running smoothly on Linux.Honestly, MusicBee and Exact Audio Copy are the only pieces of Windows software I've yet to find a native Linux alternative for that I'm satisfied with.Edit: Apparently nowadays MusicBee runs better through WINE than it used to? I'll have to try it out.
MusicBee works perfectly via Wine, and it's a major part of my digital library. Without MusicBee my MP3 player would be worth 1/10 for me.
But you can't just take the installer and double click it, you need to follow these steps (naturally replace the directories):
Install Wine Staging and Winetricks
Create prefix for MusicBee and .NET
Bash:
Install .NET 4.0 and corefonts
Bash:
Install xmllite and gdiplus
Bash:
Set Wine to Windows 7 compatibility mode
Bash:
Install .NET 4.8
Bash:
Install Music Bee
Bash:
Downloads needed:
This specific version of the .NET Framework installer
You might see warnings about WoW64 mode, experimental flags, etc, just ignore them and keep going and MusicBee will work.
Dude hell yeah you're a life saver, thank you so much!
No worries! I never found a true alternative to MusicBee, and there are several outdated tutorials about getting it run on Wine that technically work but leave you with a buggy app. The method I showed you works perfectly.
Wine???
I think I know this meme template from somewhere, but I cannot quite recall from where. Could you give us a link to the original?
The original webcomic link is dead but here’s the know your meme page
The original is a lot lamer than I thought it would be…
I have to use windows for work, and Windows Explorer annoys the everloving hell out of me.
What idiot thought that the "Home" folder and the User folder should be the different?
And regularly, when "Home" hasn't loaded I'm halfway done typing the address in the address bar "//someletters/adv" for example, it will decide to clear it to let me know I'm "Home"
You might have made my life just a little bit easier.
Another annoying one is that the address bar obfuscates the folder path if you start at Documents, Photos, etc. If I want to get to my user folder without a shortcut, it makes sense to hop to Documents and go up a level, but up a level from Documents is the useless Home directory.
@carrylex
Does it need administrator access to install? If I can weasel that onto my work desktop without having to contact our support that would be great.
It might work in WSLg otherwise?
Please don't bypass work restrictions
If somebody can easily bypass work restrictions, they probably aren't enforced or implemented properly.
That excuse won't stop them from being fired. Just because you can does not mean you should.
Knowledge is knowing how to bypass work restrictions. Wisdom is knowing not to.
Just because I shouldn't doesn't mean I shouldn't.
IT admins (and those involved in a company's security) should be fired for deploying under-configured or misconfigured Windows installations on computers.
Microsoft in general should be fired from computers - their security is absolute garbage.
I kinda want to see you argue this one. With pop-corn.
There is a high skill level needed to configure Windows properly in enterprise settings. Regardless, I wouldn't be working for an organization that trusts any Microsoft software.
Keep your popcorn ready though, it's only a matter of time before Microsoft loses the security battle - unless Microsoft makes gigantic strides in a more sustainable direction.
Irrelevant. The defense of "they should do better" will do jack to prevent the firing of someone that willfully circumvented company policy.
In some companies the restrictions are just knobs that were turned for the fun of it.
We do cloud native and they blocked WSL suddenly.
You can't use Docker/Podman without WSL. So everyone had to bypass the restriction in order to be productive.
While I don't think people should bypass work restrictions either, I get the frustration. One job I was at had some setting forcing browsers to always close tabs on close and reopen the homepage on open which was the intranet landing page. It was a pain.
Sometimes it is done for compliance. It is all about the CYA (cover your ass)
Never said I would, but if I can install it on my work desktop via the Microsoft Store without the need of administration privileges then what’s the harm?
KDE has a proven track record and I’ve already got KDE connect on my work desktop to send files from my phone to the desktop without any issues from up top, plus I’ve spoken with my IT & Managers and got the ok for a Linux distro, but they do make the point of “what if someone else uses your computer” which is fair and is why I’m hesitant for them to switch me to a Linux work station, was thinking dual booting but not sure due to Windows history of wiping EFi boot partitions.
why would anyone else use your computer? honest question. and do they need access to your local files, or just a machine?
My environment is very much mixed in with shop workers, fitters or welders sit and eat lunch at people’s desk on their breaks, my desk is a common one as I’ve gone in on overtime shifts with people using my desk phone.
and yes, we have two lunch rooms.
That sounds like a security nightmare...
The company is probably to cheap to actually do security correctly. (Until they are ransomwared or need to get cyber insurance)
I used to work a food service job that had computerized touchscreen scales for weighing out products and printing out labels for them.
I learned that particular model was running an OS vaguely labeled as "Linux", and it was on an ARM-based system. My biggest regret in that job was abstaining from trying to get Doom running on it.
Please bypass work restrictions.
Fine I will just install Linux on my work laptop. Actually curious how long I could work like that before anyone noticed.
spent almost a decade straight on Win10 LTSC then switched to regular Win11 - I think Microsoft forgot how to make software. Vanilla edition is so bloated it is scary. Considering embracing Ubuntu.
Check out Mint or PopOS! over Ubuntu.
Ubuntu is falling behind in the desktop experience, as well as their insistence of using their proprietary backend for snaps over flatpaks, and overriding tools that you expect to get the flatpaks and causing trouble shooting issues because you are expecting one behavior but getting another (not that hard to work around or translate once you know, but still a hassle.
Also, Mint and PopOS! are just great experiences and were top contenders for my personal desktop (dev, gaming, power user) switch from Win10 -> Linux. I wound up going with Arch/Garuda because it's forcing me to learn far more about Nix than I've learned as a dev. I still might make the switch since Garuda can become unstable occasionally due to the way that the OS is "bleeding edge", and forces me to troubleshoot the causes (I guess this is what I wanted to learn?) instead of doing personal dev, gaming, or desktop entertainment.
Thank you! I will try out both on my personal computer.
I recommend Mint. It's basically ubuntu with the controversial stuff disabled (Canonical's snaps mostly, but I guess also any ads for their pro services) and with an extra layer of polish.
I'm happy with it for both the "I want something that works reliably" reasons and the "I'm an engineer who wants a free system that I can control and modify" reasons.
thanks. gotta check it out.
The thing that really annoys me with Linux file explorers is that none of them have a "sort by extension". They have sort by type, but it'll mix .jpg, .png, .gif and .webp together, for instance.
I just checked and Dolphin very much has that feature, the wording in English might not be exactly the same as I have the UI in my native language but I found it in the hamburger menu under Sort by>Other>File extension.
The Sort by → Type also doesn't group together image formats, at least...
obligatory linux user: whats an extension? Surely you mean File Type.
Lol goddamn, I haven't even been using Linux that long, and I read the comment and was like "extension? Like a Firefox extension? Huh?"
Well, apparently that is a thing in Dolphin, but if what you actually want is e.g. to just move all .png files, then I prefer to use the Filter bar (Ctrl+i or the fourth entry in the hamburger menu). You can just type ".png" into it and then it hides all entries which don't contain that substring.
On windows?
Had that problem on linux, haven't tried dolphin on windows, but I wouldn't expect it to be different in that regard
Dolphin sorts by filetype. JPG, PNG etc are all different types. You can also filter by anything, extra bar
I dunno, on GNOME49 it seems to me like Nautilus is doing it by file extension. Like yeah, it's still type, but it's sorting the extensions alphabetically. There's also an extra column for "Detailed Type."
This might have been just a me issue.
But I used to be a long time Total/Double Commander user on Windows Vista & 7. But sometime after I switched to Windows 10 it stopped letting me change the default file manager to anything other than explorer...
I use the split panel feature in dolphin a lot. the shortcut is F3 if you didn't know already.
Great! Dolphin is also better than macOS Finder. I would replace it with Dolphin as well.
However, Windows Explorer in Windows 11 still excels in one area: it doesn't have a header, and the tabs are displayed on the header, like in Chromium.
It's also annoying that all KDE Dolphin tabs have that red [X] button. Sadly, the KDE developers reject great PRs like this one: https://invent.kde.org/system/dolphin/-/merge_requests/269
Who even presses those [X] buttons? I always use the Ctrl+W shortcut.
My God, what a read... I love KDE, but holy shit, these guys really need to pull the sticks out of their arses...
Still excels? I don't recall windows explorer ever being good at anything!
You are saying you like the tabs in the header, so at the top. But Dolphin lets you split, which would make that not make as much sense.
the most recent version of Finder is... a bit weird. I like all of the tools and functions it has, but it's a huge departure from the previous version of Finder, and I'm not a super-fan of some of the feature implementations. but, if you're used to using Finder for a lot of work, you won't feel too out-of-place.
I haven't used Dolphin in over a decade, so perhaps I'll check it out.
@prole @stebator but what about something like this?
Closest thing I found was adding a close button directly on the toolbar. No min/max buttons available unfortunately. Or you csn use a specific window decoration with a locally integrated menu: github.com/Zren/material-decor…
What are you asking?
I like Thunar better. There was something really minor about Dolphin I didn't like. Maybe it was the way it handled tags or something, I can't remember anymore.
Thunar = 🐐
Although, the only reason I use it is because when i made the switch many moons ago, i was following this guy's tutorial on setting up i3 and he recommended thunar. Never looked back (although, at this point i think its more about the ui than any functional difference)
I actually like the Windows file explorer. Used to be my favorite, before Dolphin. Nowadays I'd say Dolphin is slightly better overall, but could still use a change inspired by Windows or two. For instance, I really like the drive view on the Windows file explorer's home page.
In the newest versions, idk about older ones, dolphin lists all attached drives with a progress bar to show how full they are on the left panel, not too different from what youre suggesting, just built into the sidebar instead of a "my computer" type page.
It's nice, but I just really like the Windows' design of this feature. Not really anything functionality-related. Honestly, I wish I could just have the file manager from Windows Vista or 7. I don't even need tabs.
So can Okular, but recently how well it works on windows has been getting worse and worse.
I thought this was a post about the Gamecube emulator. lol
I use Freecommander with Voidtools everything for searching on Windows. it's nice.
awesome, tho tbh i like total commander on windows
Yeah, still a shame that never got ported to Linux. There's Double Commander, which is fine, but still a little inferior somehow.
Have you tried mc? (Midnight commander I think it's the full name).
I have! But.. Well, call me newfangled, but I couldn't really get used to not being able to use the mouse to drag and drop stuff to other programs.
I like using the keyboard, but I do use it in combination with the mouse, not exclusively. I don't have the memory for keyboard shortcuts, for one... Especially for stuff I don't do on the regular.
I'm with you. I like it when I'm on a remote server, but locally I'm a mouse slut lol
Now there's a term!
double commander had a weird issue where the window size wouldn't change properly and display solid color in resized area on my system for some reason :/
gentoo, worker and xfe all seemed to be pretty good, but i haven't really tried them much. mc usually works well enough.
Oh, that's weird, I haven't experienced that. Have you tried again, recently? There's also qt and gtk versions, maybe one of those works better.
It would be more useful on windows than on linux too no?
There is also Krusader that might be worth looking into.
Oh shit
Thunar >>>>>>>
Doesn't have dark mode == useless
KDM users when they're asked to toggle between infinite GTK themes instead of between "light" and "dark" themes.
Thunar is the best
Booo
I love you, maybe my work laptop will be tolerable now.
Really? That’s awesome! Hold on, I need to go install it on my one PC that still runs windows.
Dolphin is nice, but Thunar is my fave.
Thunar is a little more clunky, a little less modern in design, but it doesn't hide things as much and I like that.
Really? Been a minute since I used it, but dolphin has a lot of options. What options are hidden?
People love complaining about some random obscure feature only they and 4 others use being """hidden""" in Dolphin which usually just means it's not a default button taking up half the UI, but can be added in ten seconds by using the toolbar customization features.
Nautilus is way better
Having had to set up a KDE install recently I really, really like Nautilus GUI better. A little less customizable/extensive but it's so much cleaner.
My only real beef is having like 3 separate areas for options. Hamburger menu, then the dots in the address bar, etc.
Yeah I agree about the options fragmentation. But yes, exactly. KDE in general feels very messy visually and functionally to me.
Oooh, since we're talking about Dolphin- today I had to organize image files on an Android device, and connected it to my pc via usb to do it. I noticed Dolphin did not use image thumbnails as the file icons like it normally does on local image files. Is there a way to make it do that on externally connected devices?
I mean yeah, it's Linux. Pull requests welcome.
In Dolpin settings, under Interface > Previews, there's an option for previews from remote storage. Not sure if it applies to connected devices or just network drives though.
It can apply to both. You can set a size limit so it doesn't spend ages parsing multi gigabyte files just for a preview (unless you want it to).
Cool, I will try that out.
Omg really? I am installing this on my work laptop
A surprising amount of KDE apps have Windows builds - most importantly for me, KDE Connect. Barely any need to use Windows Phone Link anymore!
No windows 32 bit version?????? Lazy asses, it's just a checkbox! /s
I don't know how much of this is going on now, but in the early days, one could run a variety of linux apps in windows with the correct runtimes installed. this may be how WINE came about?
Just FYI, WINE is for running MS Windows software on Linux, not Linux software on MS Windows^1. As others have mentioned, I think cygwin was sort of the reverse-WINE. Also, I think KDE made a push to get their apps running on MS Windows because QT was cross-platform.
I was using WINE to play StarCraft back in like 2000. I think it predates running most Linux software on MS Windows, except for a few big, multi-platform packages like Firefox (back when it was still Netscape, then Mozilla Suite (don't remember what it was called), then Phoenix, then Firebird (right? the same name as a database, so they had to change it, iirc). Those were usually developed for each platform specifically, not just for Linux and then run with an emulator.
^1: not trying to be snarky or anything. just put it in in case you didn't know or maybe had a brain fart. Or maybe I'm wrong about the origins of WINE.
Definitely a brain fart. Thanks for looking out.
Was it cygwin, or something? I vaguely recall running an X server on Windows so I could display remote Linux gui apps locally.
You’re thinking of remote X server, but there was also something called Cygwin that allowed you to run certain Linux apps within a virtualized environment. It was basically just an X window that opened up in windows inside of which you could run Linux apps.
wasis: https://cygwin.com/Just tried it but had a hard time adding my server as a network folder like I do on fedora
Good news is I could install this without admin priveleges at work. Bad news is that while it can see my onedrive folder it behaves very badly with onedrive, click on a folder and it just dissappears. It did the same thing with Google drive as well. Since cloud is where all my data lives it's not usable currently. =(
Hmm darkmode doesn't work. And it's 615 MB on disk, is it an electron app lol
not at all. QT/KDE app. the size is probably due to bundling of QT and KDE framework libraries because usually windows installations doesn't come with system versions of those. it's like flatpak KDE runtime.
That's because of Qt and the KDE frameworks. ...Sorry those are a necessity! Though, if you installed other KDE apps now, they'd be like, 80 MiB per app!
Afaik the version is old?
nope
Hi fellow Mr. Clippit!
Hello!