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Comment by analog31 | Hacker News Reader

It took me a long time to put my finger on why I like MS Windows. I've used multiple platforms, but rarely interact with the OS. Most of my time is spent inside apps, and even while coding, I'm using languages and tools that are fairly platform-agnostic. And the UI qualities of the platforms are increasingly overridden by the seemingly random UI designs of apps.

Then it recently dawned on me: The file explorer. It's the one OS app that I use regularly, and it "just works" with a good enough layout and robust file operations.

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Many of the Linux file managers aren't great either, and sometimes fail at things I'd consider basic.

Dolphin doesn't always measure a remote FS space correctly. You have 10TB free, but it sees 0 and a 10MB file copy throws ERRNOSPC.

GVFS for non-local systems in Nautilus or Thunar is sometimes quirky too, although I haven't had any issues in a while, so either I'm used to working around the quirks or they were resolved.

Which remote FS? We regularly work with NFS without any problems.

In the last case I'm thinking of, it is Xrdp's fuse mount.

I would be willing to blame Xrdp, but Thunar works just fine side by side with the same file at the same time.

Also kind of interesting was that Dolphin's status bar shows a different free space amount than Dolphin's properties window.

Dolphin isn't perfect but if Finder worked as well as it I'd be so happy.

But not the KDE file save dialog, that thing's as frustrating as macOS's.

The title could have just been "macOS Finder is still bad"

Yes. Yes it is.

explorer is the exact reason I used Windows exclusively for decades. that, and having the Address input bar in the taskbar so i could rapidly type out and access folders.

then Windows 11 decided to remove that feature for absolutely zero reason.

> absolutely zero reason

A prevailing theory is that advanced users opt out of telemetry, where as regular users don't. So Microsoft has no idea what advanced users use and the OS gradually becomes less sophisticated.

I guess similar issue with Safari not showing the url path by default, which is completely ridiculous. It is a large part of the UX. It is not going to be of benefit to anyone.

Chrome also hides things in the url that might confuse us helpless users[1], I think they made that terrible UI change before Safari followed them off the cliff. Another reason to use FF.

1: https://support.google.com/chrome/thread/25855505/how-to-mak...

I still edit the address bar in Windows 11 file explorer all the time. Do I have a setting turned on to enable this without realizing it?

Yeah thats "Display the full path in the title bar" in folder options (where show hidden files and show extensions is at)

Otherwise the path becomes clickable buttons... which is nice sometimes when you're going back a few directories as you can just click any parent to get a list of it's siblings drop-down style.

My favorite feature is just typing cmd into the title bar which launches it at the current directory.

It wasn't available during the first releases of the File Explorer rewrite, however it has been made available for quite some months now.

That used to be the case for me, but the Explorer right-click changes in Win11 are insane.

It only shows the common options (i.e. the ones where you would use a keyboard shortcut rather than mouse), hiding anything you might actually have wanted.

Even for less skilled users, mixing horizontal/vertical icons got me a confused tech support call from my elderly father.

It's definitely bad the default was changed, but you can hold shift to get the old menu back and I believe you can make a registry change to get the old one back permanently

They are currently going pretty hard into breaking the file explorer in Windows 11. Massive latency increases and tons of weird bugs in controls.

Each new version of old things in windows increase latency.

CMD.exe is still their fastest terminal (even though it sucks on anything else).

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