On the one (windows) machine i actively use powershell i click the pinned start menu icon.
Windows has fucked my flow before by co opting my shortcuts. So this is the most reliable way.
On linux terminal is a shortcut, app launcher is a shortcut and searching apps to launch actually works and doesn’t open my browser that operates under a different privacy contract then your os settings.
I despised windows search long before i switched i just didn’t know any better.
On my one remaining Windows machine, I installed PowerToys and use the “Run” launcher. Alt+Space opens Run. If you lead with a
.you’ll search programs.Alt+Space, .term, for example, should immediately show Terminal and you can slap enter to open it. You can also do stuff like= 1 + 1or= 0b101 + 0xffor quick calculations,%for unit conversion (%% 10MB to Mb), etc. It’s not KRunner, dmenu, etc but it definitely beats the hell out of the start menu.PowerToys “Keyboard Manager” might let you reclaim some shortcuts as well. I used it to swap Caps Lock and Escape but I’m pretty sure it can be used to create custom shortcuts. There’s also some option to remap shortcuts on a program specific basis. So you can say
Alt+Tshould sendCtrl+Tbut only when Firefox has focus, for example. Haven’t messed with it myself but I can see the value.Still looking forward to ditching Windows entirely but, in the meantime, MS has some decent tools that aren’t included by default and don’t seem to be advertised because power users aren’t the target market and “they already know to look for it” I guess.
the windows key + r will open the Run command window, seems a lot easier then what you did for that but the other stuff PowerToys do is worth it
What is the difference of Terminal to say cmd or PowerShell?
~~Edit: seems to be the same thing as cmd. I usually access it with Win+R or search for cmd in start. ~~
Another edit: My work machine is Win10. There is no Terminal on my system it seems. If I search for Terminal in Start, cmd shows as the only option.
Terminal is new and a lot more flexible. It’s more of a frontend to whatever you’re using, be it cmd, powershell or wsl bash
To your edit, it isn’t the same thing as cmd. It’s more like konsole or kitty or gnome-terminal. It is a terminal container that can run cmd or powershell or bash for you.
It has other features that are nice, and that more useful systems have had since the 90s. If you’re stuck on windows, it’s to putty what ie used to be for netscape. You can use it to download putty, or use it and only be mildly irritated on someone else’s system.
Terminal can have multiple tabs, multiple different processes (so you can have a powershell and a cmd running in different tabs) and better WSL support AFAIK. It’s
wtin the Run dialog. (I’m pretty sure typing “cmd” now just opens a cmd window in terminal too)
@mod_pp They can’t even suggest the better (Tom Hanks) Terminal movie.
Typing in powershell? How a about a bing search of Windows Power Settings? Not even the settings menu, just the fucking eeb search.
Types power
Windows search:
Best match
Sure thing, bud 😂
It even recognized the local app that matches, how on earth is this a better match
It’s all relative. Best match for their user analytics. So they get good numbers to show user engagement in their board meetings.
Accidental clicks are engineered to juice those numbers too.
One pays MS per click.
I keep a small Win11 partition on my 2022 gaming laptop in case I need to take a cert exam or use a gov website, and I booted it for updating for the first time in 6 months. It took over 6 hours and 6 reboots to update! At one point, it was going bu-ding every minute from random notifications so I had to mute it.
Meanwhile, my 2012 Thinkpad T420 needed a full Fedora version upgrade, and that finished in 15 minutes.
No wonder MS is losing users
… You need Windows to use government websites? What kind of dystopian nightmare is this
wait till you find out companies that operated in South Korea had to support Internet Explorer until 2020
Ha! Oh, if you think that’s dumb… There are certain key sections of the IRS website that only function during business hours. Imagine if more sites worked like that. “Dang, it’s after 5PM, gotta do my Amazon order tomorrow.
Serbia for example have it’s gov suit and drivers only for windows. You can’t login using your personal identification card on linux, afaik (like, even if you extract encrypted key from plastic card). Can’t even scan it to obtain profile pdf. They do have “consentid” app for android tho, that can be used to log in.
Russia also falls in same category, also they don’t have plastic cards for identification, only regular passport. Digital key (basically a regular encrypted cert) can be issued thru government department responsible for taxes and again, will only work on windows for login, due to required software. It should be possible to install certificate on linux, but to login on government site you will need to use browser in wine.
Dunno about other countries, only lived in those two. I heard some African countries also have same/similar system, don’t remember which one.
yeah some government sites, regardless of what browser you’re using, think that you’re some “1337 Haxors” for using Linux Mint.
I use Qutebrowser on NixOS and sometimes it’s…yeah they don’t like that.
Can’t you trick it using a user agent switching? Been a long time since I’ve fucked with one so I forget it you can change OS on there.
I have a machine in my garage that gets used for music and the random football game. Starting it up after being down even a few weeks starts the churn of updates. It’s annoying.
Just in case you don’t know, unless it changed last time I checked, some organizations like Comptia didn’t allow computers with dual boot to be used to pass a cert exam.
I assure you my (virtual) machine only has windows on it.
On first glace I thought I’d be looking at the UI of a streaming service. This is so awful
Powertoys and that debloating scripts does wonders to make w11 usable.
Problem that powertoys are becoming bloated too. Before switching my 8gb RAM laptop to Linux, it was constantly swapping memory. I investigated and it was powertoys slowly eating everything. The two almost identical launchers, 300mb each. The eyedropper that you gonna use once a month 200mb, the help that comes out when you long press the windows key, another 80mb. Same for the screen ruler. Then the accent helper, and so on. My 8gb laptop only had 1 GB free Memory After a clean boot
AFAIK there was a memory leak in PowerToys. But it’s definitely ballooned in scope since it was first released. I suppose turning off the parts you don’t need would help but it really should still be more efficient. Doesn’t help that the Microsoft Department of AI Department seems to have started sinking its teeth into it as of the last few updates.
The last time I used the power toys was on W10 but can’t you choose which components you install? Surely you can disable the autostart for the ones you are not using?
Isn’t that the entire point of swap? If you’re only gonna access that memory once a month what’s wrong with it swapping to disk but becoming ready within seconds when you go to use it?
Dude, Windows swaps like it’s its job.
The job of swap is to be used after the RAM is full or is about to be full. It’s not to be used instead of the RAM.
I bet SSDs were a huge freaking performance boost for Windows generally speaking because of the way it swaps.
That’s not true. Linux by default also moves stuff to swap way earlier. Swap is not just a fallback when you run out of RAM. That is why I think Zram is the best. My system can swap as much as it wants to.
I’m currently dealing with an issue where on freshly installed Mint, after some time of me being away from the machine, the entire system and apps seem to have moved to the swap, which is on an hdd — so things slow down to a crawl and it takes like ten minutes to shake them back to life.
Edit: after some more troubleshooting, I’m not sure swap is the issue, but it’s still likely.
My Linux systems are all pretty RAM rich and almost never even touch swap.
That’s cool, but I’m more concerned as to why this happens while I’m away, when there’s no need for everything getting swapped while I’m at the machine.
Linux swappiness is at least easier to configure + I haven’t really noticed it happen on anything with enough RAM to do the job it’s doing.
My 8 GB Thinkpad will swap quite a bit running PyCharm, docker and Firefox on KDE Plasma. My 32 GB desktop has near-zero swap usage and it has even more shit running at all
Cries in ready boost
Yes but when it’s too much… The poor SSD in my 8gb laptop was constantly at 65°C because of all the activity. And it seems without reason. I would hear the warning sounds from crystaldiskinfo when “idle” in another room
Lol, I remember power toys from freaking tucows.com (it used to be a software repository of sorts) in the nineties.
Windows and power toys, two relics from the ICQ age.
the ICQ age
There’s a blast from the past. Uh oh!
Man, I think I still had an active Fark account more recently than I visited tucows but I remember it.
And I bet you it pulled the right Terminal as you typed “term” but as you finish it, it pulls this bullshit.
Is there a word for “a thoughtless action by someone else so incidentally awful that you can’t help but wonder if it’s intentional”?
I mean, I don’t think they’re intentionally engineering it to delay EXACTLY the amount of time it takes for me to begin the process of clicking. That would take thoughtfulness, strategy, research, etc…… right?
…right?
The Germans have a word for that, I think they call it Microsoft…
This happens on (mobile) websites all the time. It is infuriating.
or when you speed type something and it just opens edge and searches bing for the app you tried to open
so much “user friendly”
at least you get something, on my work computer, i get an empty window when i search
i have a couple of QR codes with “qr” in the file name… guess im not allowed to use 'em anymore
if you’re searching for files on windows, Everything is the tool you need
Is it as good as Google desktop was?
IDK about Google desktop but everything searches my entire 40tb of files on my pc and file server instantly. I cannot recommend it enough. I use it combined with FreeCommander for file management stuff.
I have never heard about Google desktop before
2025? I don’t remember the search in the start menu working correctly since windows 8
That was when they broke it.
I was working at MSFT when they rolled out Windows 8.
Basically broke all internal workflows for a month or two.
Then quickly had to re-enable the 7 UI they told even us employees did not exist in 8.
They did some kind of hackjob, called that 8.1, and fast forward a decade, Windows 11 had, last time I checked at least 4 different ‘eras’ of UI schemes/frameworks, if you dig far enough into all the settings menus.
I am not even joking when I say that people literally screamed at me when I used the word ‘refactor’ in a sentence, while on the MSFT campus.
Windows 7 was the last OS I was excited to get.
Im so glad that there a tangible exodus of non techie people moving away from whatever the fuckery MS is doing nowadays.
Come to Linux and find that excitement again
ahem Linux.
Thank you.
Use Everything! search for Windows. Literally one of the strongest points of NTFS is lightning fast indexing, using tools like Everything and WizTree. The only things I miss on Linux. Oh also AutoHotKey.
I just set the Everything window to appear on ALT+3 (I have found this to be a very useful shortcut because it’s rarely used by anything else and is easy to reach quickly)(some function keys also work well for it), you just type, it highlights, you press enter, you’re done. And so many sorting options.
man locateHow common it is across distros I couldn’t tell you, but it’s been a staple on Mint for a good long while and ought to be available everywhere. Basically wherever I’d use
findI trylocatefirst, unless it’s for a file that’s expected to be very new and hasn’t been indexed by the daemon yet.Debian or Gnome seem to have some kind of semi usable search in the gui. It can find files in multiple places by name, wildcard etc but I’m not sure what it can see. Everything is great on Win.
Windows: has lightning fast native indexing with ntfs Also windows: implements worst out of the box GUI search tool possible
Windows: searches bing before ntfs
Everything is what I use for files
Windows search is what I use for applications
AutoKey is an alternative to AutoHotKey, from what I understand. Haven’t gotten around to it yet, but at least it uses a proper programming language instead of the abomination that is AutoHotKey’s scripting lang.
But nothing beats Hammerspoon which is the analogue for MacOS. Lua programming, sizeable library of OS integrations, built-in http server. Ah, what a beauty it is.
