Hacker News Reader

Windows allows a lot of middleware in Explorer. The shell extensions can eat performance like crazy if they get out of hand.

Linux file managers manage to be nice and snappy. On my machine, KDE's Dolphin, on an NVME, takes, maybe, 4 seconds to open and scan a folder that has more than 9000 folders and files.

What's Windows' problem? It has no excuse. Maybe, just maybe, the Windows Explorer, plus the stack it runs on, is utter garbage.

My experience was opposite on directory with 30k files via SMB. Windows Explorer took within a second while Dolphin took 30 seconds. Nautilus took over a minutes iirc.

That’s not usually how file systems are organized; modified date and such are part of the metadata along with the filename so that you don’t have to scan the contents of the file just to list it. If it’s really that slow for a dozen files, using some kind of performance tool may be in order to figure out where the perf is going.

Actually it doesn't matter what the sort order is. This behavior exists.