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.”
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).
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).
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.
Foobar2000 is the GOAT!
I love Dolphin. Great for GameCube and Wii games.
(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
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
FOSS >> properitary🤮
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Might be, tbh. I never noticed it on my Surface, which has OneDrive disabled, but I used that one was less. Or maybe it’s some other garbage on the corporate laptop causing issues (like Trellix).
Now you made me want to investigate.
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.
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.
windows 11
oh… now I understand everything
At least on linux you have the choice. Somehow however, it seems so many people like to recreate or even worsen the windows experience. I guess Unixporn didn’t make it to lemmy, but half of those did not feel usable. Why would I want one inch wide gaps between everything?
GET THE TORCHES AND PITCHFORKS!!!
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.
Yeah, slow network mounts, especially rclone mounts, are typical examples of this.
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.
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.
On the context menu: I’ve been using Nilesoft Shell for a few years now and it’s been wonderful. It’s got all the options from Windows 10 plus a few more in the Windows 11 style.
Edit: wrong link, fixed
Yikes
I would say Windows makes the dolphin experience unusable compared to file explorer
The thing that really annoys me with Linux file explorers is that none of them have a “sort by extension”. They have sort by type, but it’ll mix .jpg, .png, .gif and .webp together, for instance.
Well, apparently that is a thing in Dolphin, but if what you actually want is e.g. to just move all .png files, then I prefer to use the Filter bar (Ctrl+i or the fourth entry in the hamburger menu). You can just type “.png” into it and then it hides all entries which don’t contain that substring.
On windows?
Had that problem on linux, haven’t tried dolphin on windows, but I wouldn’t expect it to be different in that regard
Dolphin sorts by filetype. JPG, PNG etc are all different types. You can also filter by anything, extra bar
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
So much kde stuff works on windows. Its a lifesaver
Just need windows to allow different desktops.
Like, virtual desktops/workspaces?
That’s a thing. Press windows key + tab.
No like run kde or gnome on windows i guess I’m trying to say, different desktop environments.
When I look up “Dolphin windows” I just get the wii emulator (I am clueless)
https://apps.kde.org/platforms/windows/
Halfway down the page.
I’m going to try to get Dolphin through security review at my company. QUICK everyone start listing reasons why my company should take on the risk of installing Dolphin.
You don’t try company wide.
Prepare a feasibility study on the merits on giving choice to power users without sacrificing security or increasing complexity. A multi departmental working group should be established to review the merits of the new platform, while a control group should also be established to monitor how existing solutions perform.
Once completed a multi stage rollout plan should be compiled by a different multi departmental group to make sure all workflows are covered in the new system.One million years later: “The study has been inconclusive.”
This guy corporates
I have been down that path before with Obsidian and LaTeX (Obsidian was a success and LaTeX was meh). The first step is getting the executables white listed and Its always a PITA with our security team. I need to first convince them it is worth the study, which is always hard because they are not power users. Feature lists help. Win11 explorer being dogshit also helps.
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.
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.
thanks. gotta check it out.
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.
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.
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.
Really? That’s awesome! Hold on, I need to go install it on my one PC that still runs windows.
