I was like wait this is so cool then I realized I’m on Linux already
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.
I used to run blackbox on windows xp. It worked really well too.
I love Dolphin. Great for GameCube and Wii games.
is this a /j
ComOP is joking about this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolphin_(emulator)
I thought the same thing when I saw the comic.
could be, or not, we will never know for sure
either way, it is funny
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.”
You mean GNU\Windows\NT
Backslashes in file paths makes me go 🔥😡🤬😤😾💥
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).
Sounds more like Winbloat. >_>
😢
That’s just running a full fat installation of Windows.
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.
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:
WINEPREFIX=/home/kadupse/Wine/MusicBee/ wineboot –initInstall .NET 4.0 and corefonts
Bash:
WINEPREFIX=/home/kadupse/Wine/MusicBee/ winetricks --force dotnet40 corefontsInstall xmllite and gdiplus
Bash:
WINEPREFIX=/home/kadupse/Wine/MusicBee/ winetricks xmllite gdiplusSet Wine to Windows 7 compatibility mode
Bash:
WINEPREFIX=/home/kadupse/Wine/MusicBee/ winetricks win7Install .NET 4.8
Bash:
WINEPREFIX=/home/kadupse/Wine/MusicBee/ wine $HOME/Downloads/ndp48-x86-x64-allos-enu.exe /qInstall Music Bee
Bash:
WINEPREFIX=/home/kadupse/Wine/MusicBee/ wine $HOME/Downloads/MusicBeeSetup_3_6.exeDownloads needed:
This specific version of the .NET Framework installerYou 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.
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Wine???
Can recommend, Dolphin makes life on windows slightly more tolerable. Kate for Windows is also amazing
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.
(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
FOSS >> properitary🤮
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 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
For me is the tree view (like explorer), it doesn’t feel comfortable and I can’t put my finger on why. On Windows explorer it felt quicker (like on a practical level, not about performance).
But guess I gotta use it so… Dealing with it
Yeah, I miss Windows Explorer. Which I find really shocking. But I think it’s just missing the accumulated years of muscle memory.
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.
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
My God, what a read… I love KDE, but holy shit, these guys really need to pull the sticks out of their arses…
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.
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.
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.
You can make literally any window of any program have no header with KDE. I’m pretty sure you can make Dolphin look exactly how you are describing.
What are you asking?
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
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.
has gotten better in a lot of ways
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
GET THE TORCHES AND PITCHFORKS!!!
Nah, who cares. We even have guys around who claim that they like vim. Just another crazy isn’t a reason to get torches. We save them for a real occasion.
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.
When I quit using vim, I noticed how easier and brighter my life became. But I am a programmer, not a sysadmin.
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.
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.
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.
A surprising amount of KDE apps have Windows builds - most importantly for me, KDE Connect. Barely any need to use Windows Phone Link anymore!
