Terminal > Windows Registry.
Web search on the start menu.
🤮
Web in the search, AI in the search, personal assistant in your files, things in your things that you don’t want, didn’t ask for and are struggling to extract.
things in your things that you don’t want, didn’t ask for and are struggling to extract.
We have a word for these. It’s called “parasites.”
I wouldn’t mind that as an optional function, having a single global search field that brings up whatever you are looking for seems really convenient on paper.
Of course not the way msoft does it, where you never get the thing you want unless you are being really precise (like searching for appdata only yielding web results until you specifically type %APPDATA%).
For about a year or two, windows had an amazing search from the menu that used a blazing fast index search to search files, directories, and file contents locally and almost instantaneously. It was a glorious thing.
I cannot think of a case in which a user would not need to distinguish between web search and file search (other than the convenience of a single click). I do use a unified search on my phone that includes files, apps, and contacts, and if it’s not in any of those, it will launch a web search using the query. That is more than adequate. If it were performing the web search in real time, I wouldn’t be able to easily access apps and contacts, and the results would slow and change while typing.
I remember that, pretty sure it was in win7 or early win10, before they crammed cortana in there and you had to start jumping through hoops to disable all the garbage they added.
As for the search results, I’m not saying the user shouldn’t be able to distinguish them; in fact the way I imagine it is that the results are grouped by category and in a user determined order of priority.
For the loading times I have nothing, that isnt really avoidable with my idea.
Perhaps with some visual trickery that fades or slides the results in over a second or two, ending on the web results. It would give the web search part time to run behind the scenes, seemingly appearing as quickly as the others.
Its even worse than that. It is completely unpredictable and just does what it want. When I type in “Vi”, the first choice is Visual Studio. It will stay on Visual Studio until I have typed in “Visual Studi”. But if I’m a fast typer, and I type in the entirety of “Visual Studio”, it opens Visual Studio Code.
So the fastest way to open up Code is to type “VSC”. This doesn’t work with “VS” for Visual Studio.
I have to type out “Spot” specifically to open Spotify. Typing out Spotify opens edge.
There are also files and programs it cannot find despite having been installed for years, even though I’ve MANUALLY added the paths to the searched directories.
If anyone of you is on Windows for whatever reason and want your mind blown, try downloading a little program called Everything. It can literally find every single program on your computer as fast as you can type. And it looks up exactly what you type in. It also supports wildcard characters etc. This is the kind of behavior I expect from my computer. Sure, make a shiny frontend for casual users who don’t need to see every single file on their system, but please, why do I have to go through third parties to get this experience on an OS that my company paid for, when I can get the same experience out of the box on any free Linux distro?
Powertoys Run is really good as well, and developed by MS which is just en extra layer of absurdism considering how bad the start menu search is. I mapped powertoys Run to the windows key and have not looked at the start menu since, literally.
I honestly thought I was the only one that has those problems. I think the thing that gets me is when you install a program, the installer closes, you don’t know where in gods name it just installed to, so you type the name of the program and windows is like “sorry never heard of it”, so you go to the programs list and it’s right there.
What you mentioned is particularly frustrating because I too will type full program names and it often switches on the very last letter. It’s even more frustrating that the user can’t manipulate the search by typing a few letters, realizing those letters are shared by two programs, and then typing a few more letters to lead it to your program without moving to the mouse. Instead it acts like you’ve added no info and recommends the same thing.
Also if you go to uninstall a program by right clicking it in start or search and instead of uninstalling it presents you with a list of programs which you then have to go find the program again in and then hit uninstall again. Been that way for 8 years now.
Also if I could pick my search engine rather than getting one of the shittiest ones rammed down my throat
Luckily on KDE plasma this is just a GUI setting.
LiNuX uSeR iNsTaLlInG A BrOwSeR haha
yeah uh…
sudo apt install firefoxsudo xbps-install firefoxsudo pacman -Syu firefoxnix-env -iA firefox
Ahahahah imagine writing a short story to install a browser
Yeah, totally.
Just imagine trying to do this with Windows Powershell, without a package manager like chocolatey to make it simple like linux…
$workdir = "c:\installer\" If (Test-Path -Path $workdir -PathType Container) { Write-Host "$workdir already exists" -ForegroundColor Red} ELSE { New-Item -Path $workdir -ItemType directory } $source = "https://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-latest&os=win64&lang=en-US" $destination = "$workdir\firefox.exe" if (Get-Command 'Invoke-Webrequest') { Invoke-WebRequest $source -OutFile $destination } else { $WebClient = New-Object System.Net.WebClient $webclient.DownloadFile($source, $destination) } Start-Process -FilePath "$workdir\firefox.exe" -ArgumentList "/S" Start-Sleep -s 35 rm -Force $workdir/firefox*its four words
sudo pacman -S firefoxis also enough. -Syu is for updating.It’s been 8+ years since I last used Ubuntu on my laptop. I faced massive issues with staying on the latest version of Firefox because apt had a much older version, and installing using the gui installer wouldn’t replace the apt version etc etc. Probably a PEBKAC issue…
But, I do want to know- is this not an issue any more? Will
aptinstall the latest (or almost latest) version of Firefox? Can I update it from the inbuilt update tool in Firefox?Can I update it from the inbuilt update tool in Firefox?
Universally regarded as a bad idea on Ubuntu based distros as far as my research goes.
Probably a PEBKAC issue…
Staying on the OTB repos in LTS distros and then complaining about software being slow to update is like staying on the OTB mirror, and then complaining that your download speeds suck.
I’m a Linux noob through and trough, use Glorious Mint, but like… How to get a newer version of VLC, than distributed by upstream is probably the first thing I figured out how to do.
Can I update it from the inbuilt update tool in Firefox?
Universally regarded as a bad idea on Ubuntu based distros as far as my research goes.
Why?
One thing Linux needs to do is change the perception of how hard everything is compared to Windows. Some things are extremely less difficult on Linux.
Problem is is that is that too many people insist on doing things the Windows way and they get frustrated because of it. For example, instead of going to the software center, they choose to download their programs from a website, even though that’s not how you’re supposed to do it most of the time. They’ll also spend hours trying to get Windows only programs to run, when there are alternatives available that work just as well.
That’s absolutely true. I made the same mistakes and I got absolutely mad.
I still don’t fully know how to install rpm files lmao, that’s how I learned about Apt back on linux mint, don’t remember what I was trying to install as it was like 15 years ago. Deb files were nice because they did work like a windows user would expect.
I don’t even know what rpm files are xD. I personally havent figured out how to make use of a tar.gz file.
A tar file is similar to a ZIP file. The easiest way to uncompress them is by using your file manager and right clicking.
I know, but since Programms often ship as tar.gz I still have no fucking clue on how to finally install a Programm from it.
Let’s use Tor Browser as an example since that’s one of the programs that typically gets installed with a tarball. Once you’ve downloaded and extracted the tarball, you’ll want to navigate to the extracted files. You can do this in the terminal using CD commands, but I think it’s easier and a little more intuitive to just use your file manager and navigate to the folder that way. Once you’re in the correct folder, you’ll want to right click on an empty space and select “open and terminal.” Now you’ll have a terminal open and it will already be in the correct directory. From here you’ll want to run the “start-tor-browser.desktop” script. To do this, simply type ./start-tor-browser.desktop and you’ll be able to follow along from there.
Running programs from a Tar image typically involves running a script. You just have to change the name of the script to match whatever they have in the directory. Auto complete is your friend here. You don’t have to actually type the entire name of the script, you only need to type the first few letters and then hit tab.
Both OS are hard if you don’t know how to use them.
Both OS are easy if you know how to use them.
Linux’s problem is fragmentation. There’s not a single OS that many people are familiar with like Windows. Instead there’s hundreds of different distros that all function in a variety of different ways. Even if a person learns to do something on Mint or Ubuntu, they will be completely lost trying to do the same thing on Fedora or Arch.
hundreds of different distros
And out of those “hundreds” only a handful of them are actually popular and progressing innovation…
As someone who’s distro hopped across a wide verity of distros, the fundamentals are more less the same across all of them. Just go with a popular distro with good documentation and you’ll be fine. If you’ve learned enough from mint to feel comfortable tackling Arch Linux, then the documention (e.g. ArchWiki) will be your strongest asset.
Good documentation is great to have. Here’s the thing though. If you need documentation to use an OS… That just proves that it really is harder for people to use.
Mint and Windows both share the ability to pick it up and use it for the majority of what most people do. Arch is like the textbook example of having to learn a bunch in order to use Linux.
I think Arch is meant for people who want to learn the software - so that you can also choose, control, customize, diagnose, and fix the software!
That said, archwiki is still a great resource on other distros for when something does go wrong, or when it’s not obvious how to do something, particularly when messing with experimental or server stuff.
The Arch wiki is one of the main reasons I use Arch/Arch based Distros. Its so insanely good and after you learned some of the basic stuff and what certain terms mean its a very good resource for doing stuff.
I mean, fucking with the registry was always a thing in windows
Speeding Windows 7 desktop up by changing animation duration of taskbar & co. from 400 ms to less.
I even have to tell stupid windows to interpret the bios clock as UTC.
Literally a KDE setting. In the GUI.
And nobody needs that, otherwise there would be a plasmoid.
Unlike us power users, many people like the web search.
Still the fact that this can be easily disabled with a single registry key is an advantage of Windows, not a detriment.
It’s only easy if you know the exact key and finding that isn’t easy at all. And also Microsoft likes to brake these fixes every couple of updates
Normal people (idiots) would rather spend 4 years of their overall life “hacking” with Windows to avoid 30 minutes learning to use a forward slash.
I’ve spent ways less time editing the windows registry than I’ve spent trying to fix all the dual monitor bugs with linux.
Windows issues/changes are a 30 second google search away, linux issues often enough require a 1 hour deep dive into multiple forums.
(Idiots)… Way to roast normal people. Don’t know if they will ever recover. The best bit was putting it in brackets.
You are normal people.
You are normal people.
For a fact, i’m not normal.
