We replaced all the good programmers with bad programmers, gave them llms to increase their output and incentivized them to leave the company in four years.
You’ll never believe what happened next!
E: oh yeah, we also decided to rewrite the whole thing in a mishmash of different languages to “increase security” so now everything’s slower as a baseline on top of basic functions not working. Surely the security gains from memory safe languages will overcome the vulnerabilities present in code written the stupid way.
Although I have long since ditched Windows, I hope that there is a come back for alternative file managers. There were some really excellent replacements that were always better. Directory Opus was probably the best, had tons of cool features, but was slightly heavier than Explorer back then. Now it would be faster AND better.
idk why a trillion dollar company can’t write a program that simply shows you a list of files. Their new notepad is also shockingly slow and I just can’t imagine how
MS exec: we could make everything faster by preloading everything. lets put a team on this.
A spectre is haunting silicon valley…
What exactly makes it so hard to write a file manager that just works? Isn’t that like the bare minimum an OS should do well?
They want you to use AI to interact with the file system, so they can data mine and serve ads in the results. The file manager is going to slowly get worse in order to encourage you to use the AI agent. Eventually the file manager will only be for nerds, like the terminal.
Ewwwww
Sorry, no money left for
basic functionality. All money spent onchat bot GPUs.instructions unclear, all the devs are working in telemetry
I feel like it’s just a neglected feature these days because more software is moving to the model of in-app storage like you see on mobile devices.
Also file systems are just over-complicated in the first place. There are so many edge cases with directory and file permissions, different types of files, file sizes, file locking, change notifications, remote file systems, file extended metadata, file system indexing, thumbnails, file encryption, etc. They’re a bad abstraction for anything that isn’t just storing some documents. And you mess up file handling and people lose really important stuff.
With Windows though, I think it’s just 'cause they don’t want to touch a bunch of legacy C++ code that no one understands. And having to reimplement a thousand little features that have been added to File Explorer over the last couple decades.
They’re a bad abstraction for anything that isn’t just storing some documents.
Idk about that, they’re really convenient for representing state in a way that can be universally manipulated without running expensive software like a database. A DB makes more sense when performance in critical, but increases the complexity of interacting with configuration, snapshotting state, or inputting data/extracting data.
They’re also intuitive, since a filesystem is basically just a filling cabinet. It makes it easy to teach and learn through play.
The last thing a file system based database needs is file permissions and all the other weird stuff that goes on in a file system. They’re really complicated for the functionality they support. But a file system is always available to software so it seems intuitive and simple. I just wish computers didn’t rely on them so much.
I’m not sure what you’re proposing, the unix philosophy is really valuable for like enabling all modern computing (even as it’s less followed we only got this far because of it) and if we stop storing data as strings in file systems basically all interoperability fails as APIs are too bespoke.
You can’t or shouldn’t keep a lot of data in memory, serialised data stored in DBs is super hard to handle and often less performant with transcoding for manipulation. What do you propose instead? Models like what android apps use still used file systems and are basically the worst of both worlds, being horribly anti user.
File systems are mad intuitive, look at a book shelf, you’re 90% there. What else do you propose?
A lot of storage these days is in object storage like S3. There’s no partial writes, file permissions, extended metadata (it might have this actually), or directories. It just does what you want most things to do: stores a bit of data that can be retrieved later using some key. You could imagine storing a shared library or or executable just about anything in that or a similar fashion. In fact, I’m using Fedora Silverblue, which is a Linux distro that stores most of its root filesystem in a git-like content-addressable ostree repository (potentially even stored in object storage on the remote update servers). The filesystem is just a formality because that’s what software is currently written to understand.
And even document storage is stored this way in cloud services. Google Docs and Office 365 are presumably just storing their documents as a group of objects. A Word document is a zip file containing XML files and other assets. In a cloud environment, that can be exploded into separate objects for faster updating.
Filesystems don’t even support atomic transactions other than file renames. Windows NTFS used to have this but it was buggy and now basically unsupported. The performance characteristics of filesystems are also really unpredictable (when is your flash storage going to do a garbage collection?) and they don’t have a whole lot of features for doing performance-sensitive things outside of escaping the filesystem altogether. Relational databases just preallocate larger files and then use filesystem-specific operations to avoid a bunch of churn in the write-ahead logs and such. Since they have their own durability mechanisms.
I think a virtual-memory like addressing system could also work for persistent storage. You basically keep all the bookkeeping stuff that filesystems do to keep track of free space, but without the variable-size files with extents and permissions and all those shenanigans.
I would not really hold up s3 style object storage as particularly useable. Discoverability is arse, name collisions are easy, listing contents is extremely inefficient, updating access control is a fucking nightmare.
I don’t think the demands of distributed computing should necessarily inform design decisions for single user or mainframe computing, I agree that performance is unpredictable but that’s why you don’t rely on hammering the disk for performance. The underlying hardware is always going to be a bit unpredictable anyway, if you want stuff like always having atomic transactions you are going to be doing a lot of copying, that wears out hardware and is just unnecessary for a lot of applications.
I’m not saying they’re always good, just that saying they’re (always) a bad abstraction is wrong.
This one’s fast as fuck, MS should just buy them https://filepilot.tech/
Preloading a program to deal with performance regressions is a feat only Windows can achieve.
Imagine if KDE or GNOME had to come out and say, yeah our file manager has to start before you even enter the desktop.
.Meanwhile Apple’s file manager is borderline unusable and has been since it was introduced as “Finder” with a creepy face.
I mean back in the day when Gnome had desktop icons, Nautilus did draw those. So the file manager was, in fact, started before you could see your desktop. Windows did the same thing I’m pretty sure, I’m kind of surprised that the article seems to imply it doesn’t anymore. Maybe it’s now just sort of a component dll, and the fully featured file explorer loads a bunch more crap.
KDE, XFCE etc. would also need to do one of those things.
Windows did the same thing I’m pretty sure
With Windows, Microsoft was facing an antitrust suit (back when those happened) for leveraging their monopoly position in the PC operating system market to force Internet Explorer upon everybody, so what they did is merge the file browser (including the Desktop) and Internet Explorer into a single thing so they could claim it is actually an essential component of the operating system. Whatever Nautilus was doing 20 years ago, it wasn’t that stupid.
Having the desktop icons and the file manager view run the same code makes perfect sense. You would want both of those things to look and behave the same.
Putting a web browser into your file manager, on the other hand, is totally unnecessary. Those are completely different things.
Gnome never did integrate a web browser into Nautilus. KDE did though, not sure if that’s still there. It was some modular thingy of course, so there’s still some separation there. I’m assuming Microsoft also did it kinda like that, they just pretended it’s totally integral in their legal defense. KDE did just because Windows did it, of course.
Amiga Workbench hours, who up
Store the file manager in the BIOS ROMs
What’s a good example of a file manager? I also feel like file management is a problem of poor organizational schemes.
thunar
Dolphin!
opening a terminal and running
lstakes me ~2 seconds on Linux, mostly down to how fast I can hit the keysWe can go faster
alias l='ls'append
lsto your.bashrc(or equivalent)
Oh OK so this isn’t a bit huh
I enabled onedrive on my work PCs so I can keep my documents synced and that was a big mistake because the integration into file explorer is slowwww, and windows 11 made it even slower!
It took me like 3 hours of fucking around a month ago to remove that shit from my Surface computer. It’s embedded so deeply into the stupid system. I removed it first thing years ago, but apparently the computer’s been creating phantom “Documents” and “Photos” folders and every once in a while a program will save stuff to those rather than my actual folders that I want used that are set up as proper library directories and otherwise work just fine.
they need to make an AI that generates machine code from executables so it doesn’t have to directly go through the CPU (primitive (derogatory))
I heard you like computers
I’m not sure how good it is, but you can use Dolphin File Manager on windows.
I’ve never had a problem with Dolphin. It’s got tabs, right click menus… pretty much everything you expect.
