Fedora Kinoite (atomic + KDE) has been a breath of fresh air. The Dolphin file manager alone was worth the switch, and connecting my phone via KDE Connect is the most excited I've been about software in a while. The atomic part has been surprisingly painless.
It hasn't been free from small bugs (what software is, nowadays?), but at least I know they're not there because of greed, so it pushes me towards contributing instead of hating the developers.
I'd love to see a shameless rip of of Windows explorer for Linux
- Tree view on main panel (can expand folders without navigating into them).
- Checksum validation under "properties".
- Filter function (like search, but faster and persistent across navigation).
- When dragging and dropping, explicit distinction between "move here", "copy here", "link here", and "move into new folder".
- Browsing SFTP drives natively.
- Native Git integration.
- Well integrated notifications for long operations.
- Disk usage statistics (technically "filelight"). Like WinDirStat, but with circles.
In what way is the MS Windows file explorer good? It neither has tabs, side-by-side view, pattern selection, performant search, an UI, that doesn't regularly blocks and becomes unresponsive, etc... .
What feature does it have, that some other file manager, doesn't have? I can't think of any?
I upgraded back down to Win10 and plan on making it my absolute last Windows version I ever use, Win 11 is just unbelievably shit in so many ways even by M$ standards.
How come? I can't think of a single redeeming feature of windows file explorer that I need (or use).
Heck, it effectively doesn't have text search (grep -R) and b/c it's so bad there is the "window search" service that even worse. It has the absolutely worst imaginable zip file (erm folder) reader as a side bonus. Security file permissions management is just horrid (along with the fact some of them are coupled with registry paths)
I don't recall seeing a correct file system operation time estimation.
Edit - since explorer.exe is both the shell and the file manager, and the former craps itself often enough (task manager or taskkill /im explorer.exe), it's another negative point.
For me the perfect file manager is Total Commander or Midnight Commander or Double Commadner.
Maybe the crashes could be solved with a more stable os like debian, but the explorer shell integration is on windows on another level with network storage.
Good joke, made my day! : )
(very sorry, it is late, would love to collect and expand in a dedicated thread later. a prime reason for hating to turn on my work computer - no Windows at home! -, me, the tech enthusiast since learned how to hold a screwdriver, is Windows Explorer. so many senseless inconsistencies with unfinished junk petrified into unmutable practicies that changing line of work where never ever need to use Windows again is getting increasingly attractive very fast. even goat herding sounds a sensible alternative sometimes)
I am getting about ~4 hours of active usage where the display is on full time and I'm doing things (code editing web apps and scripts, running Docker containers, browsing, listening to music, etc.). I wouldn't mind more battery life out of it if possible, but it's not the end of the world.
What I'm really happy about is the price / performance ratio of Nimo's laptops.
I picked this one up: https://www.nimopc.com/products/nimo-15-6-n155-r7-6800h-fhd-...
It was $575 on Amazon a few months ago. It's a 15" 1080p IPS display, Ryzen 7 6800H (8 core / 16 threads), 32 GB of memory, 1TB SSD with an integrated AMD 680M GPU. That GPU can use up to 8 GB of system memory as its VRAM (you can configure the amount in the BIOS). It also has a 2 year warranty.
I initially got it as a travel laptop since I mainly use desktop machines. The keyboard is good and has a backlight, the trackpad is good to the point where I don't use trackpads much at all and I don't feel like it's in the way or a problem. Niri is super trackpad optimized too, I'm using 3-4 finger gestures a lot.
It's quite fast for what I'm doing with it and like it a lot. Once I'm back from traveling, I'll write an extensive blog post on my experience with it.
I don't work for the company or have any affiliation with them, I bought it with my own money. The only interaction I had with them was calling their support before I bought it to see if it was still returnable if I formatted the drive and put Linux on it. They said absolutely, it's no problem. I had no intent on returning it unless the hardware died early. For reference when I called I got a human very quickly and they were friendly.
If you spend some time tweaking some settings and tuning drivers, I've been able to squeeze 10-12hrs out of an 16t Zen 3 laptop on 7nm node, and 8-12hrs out of a 16t Zen 4 refresh laptop on a 4nm node. You should be able to squeeze more out of a Zen 5 refresh with efficiency cores on a smaller node.
Out of the box, Linux is configured for the widest compatibility, and that means not enabling or tuning all settings for optimal battery life. Getting good battery life is achievable, just expect to do some tweaking.
For example:
- Using the amd_pstate in active mode
- TuneD (or power-profiles-daemon, but it's less comprehensive)
- powertop --auto-tune
- ASPM in powersave mode
- WiFi/BT driver power management
- Tweaking amdgpu power management settings
- Adjusting brightness/backlight timeout
- Downclocking & undervolting CPU/APU
- Also look into the kernel's thermal governors
TuneD + powertop will take care of most of that for you automatically, modern Linux distros enable amd_pstate in active mode by default, there are tools for automating GPU powersaving, and backlight behavior has a GUI in DEs.
See:
- https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Category:Power_management
- https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Power_management
- https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/power/index.html
- https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/driver-api/pm/devices...
- https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/driver-api/thermal/in...
In my case I went with an old thinkpad X220, the battery is heavily degraded and It can't do less than 13W while streaming even with hardware video decoding due to the old inefficient chips in it, but even then I get between 3 to 4 hours of remote usage out of it. I can connect it to my computer using whatever available wi-fi or 4g/5g tethering, tailscale takes care of encryption and making a direct connection (no hops, thats important for latency). I've swapped the wlan card (multiple generations behind) with a modern intel wlan with wi-fi 6 which helps getting good network performance.
Sunshine can achieve a fluid performance (60fps, low latency, low res) as long as it can get between 200KiB/s (idling) and 300KiB/s of bandwidth. Tuning sunshine was a bit of a pain since it was really made for local ethernet streaming at 10MiB/s+. The first thing is to sacrifice encoding latency by swapping the "inefficient" hardware encoder with a software encoder set to one of the "slow" presets. This will lower your bandwidth req. right away and the latency increase is negligible when taking into account typical wan network latency. Host CPU load is minor at low resolutions and 60fps. H264 is all that X220 can decode, so H264 it is, but newer machines should afford you fancier video encoders. For some reason you can't control the Opus encoder bitrate and in my tests it was encoding at 64KiB/s (512kbps !), so usually I disable sound. There seems to be a 128kbps mode in the code but it might be busted for now. Disabling FEC also helps. Just remember that sticking to low resolutions makes everything quadratically more efficient :). Chroma subsampling is the enemy of colorful text, so you will want to enable 4:4:4 mode in moonlight if your hardware decoder supports it! (and of course the X220 hardware dec. can't do that, so no sharp syntax highlight for me when on battery!, though because of my astigmatism I like using bold text which is less susceptible to that....)
Anyway, sorry for my info dump, just wanted to share.
> Early last week, Microsoft accidentally broke the Windows Media Creation Tool (MCT) just a day ahead of Windows 10's end-of-life. Additionally, the company began requiring Online Accounts for Windows 11 installations, making them increasingly difficult to bypass.
> Every previously reported issue has been addressed or resolved, except for the broken localhost functionality and now this WinRE problem.
C:\Windows\System32\WaaSMedicSvc.dll C:\Windows\System32\usosvc.dll C:\Windows\System32\wuaueng.dll
For example, the latest MacOS sequoia security update broke the touch id reader when logging in, i need to type my password now everytime. And lets not forget about the new glass design and UI changes in the latest iOS.
Im pretty tired of updates at this point and will push them out unless absolutely necessary.
Windows used to be about backwards compatibility. Microsoft was proud of it. Twenty year old software ran on it.
Now it is all about AI stuff that I do not give a fuck about.
As a systems guy by trade and now a security guy by role, that scares the every living fuck out of me.
The risk of not updating your desktop OS every week is vastly overstated, and I believe this is at least in part due to fear mongering by companies like Microsoft who use said fear as a tool to keep people on the latest version with the latest tracking and ads.
The first issue is you don't meaningfully control the timing (ie. defer until you have time to deal with any fallout, which may be >30 days), and that you can't manage your risk by reviewing what's in them and selectively picking the ones you want (ie. true security fixes with limited surface area to bork things).
Once upon a time both those things were easy (eg. meaningful descriptions) and under your control.
More to the point, I'd agree I'd love it if they had a widely available basic version and a separate version where they can chase the latest shiny object, but I can't see them being motivated to do that in the foreseeable future.
I've used Arch on both servers and on desktop for a few years, and the only issue I ever had was pacman breaking due to both signing and file conflicts. I also had this on Debian and Ubuntu, (apt just simply stopped working, and nothing I did would make it work), so it isn't unique to Arch.
I'm not being defensive of Arch, I just think a lot of folks think rolling release = bugs. For the ones that do have stuff break, they typically modify their environment with huge customizations that would break anything, including Debian, Ubuntu, Windows, or any other OS.
I'll report back if my CachyOS install ever breaks, however, the only reason I stopped using Arch prior to this was that I was playing a few games that didn't work. Now, they do, and I don't really play new games or games with anti-cheat, and all my other software (I'm a retired/disabled dev) works fine.
One problem that matches that behavior but is under-recognized, you might not have enough space in your Recovery partition.
If so this can be a showstopper you are expected to have your IT department on top of.
I wonder if this is related to what I experienced. After the update (update and shoutdown reliably updates and restarts again, does not shut down) a parctice of mine switching Control and Fn keys on my Mac so Control key function gets into the same physical position as Ctrl on the PC keyboard, so using Windwos through Microsoft Remote Desktop and at the keyboard of the Windows computer is a smoother switch, is not working anymore. Windows, through the Remote Desktop does not register the Fn key as Ctrl anymore. The whole thing does not make sense to me. The Remote Desktop software on Mac did not change, MacOS should send Remote Desktop the signal of Control key pressed when pressing Fn, the Windows update shall have no effect, yet the sole change here was the Windows update when this annoying thing emerged. I simply had no time to dive into diagnostics and find the underlying reason, it is less resource intensive and less painfull - but one more annoyance on top of the many concerning Windows use - learning to use different Ctrl button location on Mac and PC keyboard again (done before, before learning the Control <> Fn switch trick).
the update immediately prior to this broke password protected fileshares. Had to wait weeks for a patch to be deployed.
What's worse, is that so many similar problems have occured over the last 20 years is that when you try to search for the problem, you are highly likely to not find the actual cause+workaround, but will instead find one from years before that doesn't exactly apply to the current situation.
Then there is the whole AI KPIs that most companies are pushing on their employees, and given CoPilot, they surely must be pushing a lot.
The reason for the mismatch was the cleared positions are Azure, so was hoping for a position as a developer on the Defender product, but they don't really have that in the cleared space.
My home mini pc is having Bluetooth issues from last 6-7 months after some update. I can't go back, tried every possible solutions. Best option: wait for them to fix it.
The issue: Sometimes if the Windows boot normally, Bluetooth won't turn on. I have to force restart to have it on. My guess is it's trying to optimize the power or something. I gave up.
My other laptop and work computer are still Windows 10, so some sanity left. I have installed kubuntu on another spare laptop and slowing moving towards linux entirely.
But for now, with big enterprise office requirement, macOS is the next best refuge for most companies.
I think there is more to it: IT desktop admins mostly trained on the microsoft ecosystem, GPOs, etc.
DirectX because steam defacto runs on Windows only for the vast majority of games, and not everyone wants a steam deck form
I can't think of any other S tier use cases tbh
But I had to put my Windows install somewhere because some rare games like Battlefield 6 require onerous anticheat access at the kernel level and refuse to support Linux, so I moved it to my 256GB drive where Linux used to be.
I did that on Friday. And Windows corrupted itself on every boot. Eventually I gave up trying to make it work and shoved it onto a small partition on the end of my M.2 drive. The SSD is a bit older and has some errors on it but Linux worked just fine, but Windows couldn't handle the drive.
Reminded me of the meme about roses dying if the pH balance of the soil isn't perfect, but daisies are like "Fuck yeah, concrete!" growing in literal cracks in the sidewalk.
I wonder if my problems were related to them fucking with things, or if it's just a coincidence.
The thing is, I've been aware of the power of MacOS and especially Windows to alter my computing environment against my wishes under the threat of not being patched for a while, and it's something nobody else seems to care about even when I pointed it out.
As much as things are better on all operating systems (drivers aren't really a problem anymore, for example, and chargers are practically universal, and battery-life is glorious!)- there are things that are really shitty, and we ignore the solved problems. I'm now also feeling a huge amount of catharsis.
Linux, however, has genuinely never been better.
Now there is a further update, KB5070773 which fixes this.
Tried it and it works.
So far.
Some machine was have need their screens on 24/7 it was working fine til 25H2 came along and nothing we tried seemed to fix it.
Edit: Oh an added to this is we have no policy allowing any machine to update to 25H2... yet somehow some machines did.
Just another day in the MS ecosystem
