Had to use a W11 machine last week and this was one of the 1st things that annoyed the shit out of me. On W10 you start typing an app name and press enter and it opens. What the fuck are they at changing that. And don’t get me started on Outlook or Windows explorer.
Fuck you Microsoft. I’m going to Linux as soon as possible
What the fuck are they at changing that.
Ads. These are sponsored results, and they want them to show up first. Sure, you bought to OS (probably), but…
To play devil’s advocate, only people unfamiliar with Windows would look for a terminal that way.
Why? I use the start menu reach for every app that’s not on my taskbar. How else would you do it?
Win+R?
Win+X.
And? Why shouldn’t I expect to be able to find essential OS tools and settings by using the OS search?
It shows it to you… Just not first option. The app is actually called Windows Terminal, which is why you get it by typing wt.
That’s part of the issue: in the picture is written “Terminal”, so I expect to find it if I search Terminal. I don’t care what is the real name under the hood, I’m searching something for the name you have given me.
You’re not wrong but there’s something very funny about a gaggle of Linux evangelists complaining about it not being obvious what aliases to type to open something
I understand them: I am an old Linux user, used to the command line. In there, once upon a time, a command has only on way to be called, and that way was the name under which the command was known and distributed. Aliases were a personal customization made by the user for his own amusement. I am still under the assumption that if a program is presented to you as X, then X is the command to type to run said program. But I understand this is now not as obvious, even in the Linux world.
One of the hard problems I still have today in Linux is if I’m having trouble with software and need to know what it is actually called, sometimes that is difficult. Like how am I supposed to know the installer is called calamares or the text editor is called leafpad when the OS calls them “installer” and “text editor”
Exactly, that is IMHO a not-so-sane default that some application launcher adopts. Thankfully you can switch to a more “normal” behavior, it’s a flag somewhere in the configuration menus for the application launcher, at least in KDE and in XFCE
Oh there’s absolutely no excuse for it not to open Terminal when you type
terminal. I can’t replicate it on my side but I’ve probably turned that “feature” off ages ago. I’m a little surprised at the downvotes, as I’m making fun of Windows. Linux used to have a reputation for its learning curve, especially knowing CLI commands. Daunting stuff for the average user. It’s better now, and beautifully enough it’s Microsoft’s fuckery with putting unwanted shit in their OS that’s teaching people more about the inner workings of the system they’re using, both pushing them towards gutting the OS, and towards other OSes. In the Lemmy demographic that’s usually Linux, around me it’s actually been Macs, and those are even more egregiously expensive where I live.Another way the esotericness tables have turned: the Windows configuration UIs have similar names, do adjacent functions, and aren’t listed anywhere in one place. You have to know what setting you want and where it’s found. There used to be one Control Panel, and a few advanced tools you could find in the Start menu. Microsoft wants to “modernize” some of these, so they’ve pulled parts of their settings piecemeal into their new Settings UI (which they call an app, I don’t like that). But you still have some settings that are still in the legacy Control Panel UI. You have a ton of settings that are still in standalone legacy settings UIs. Some of them look like Windows 10, some like Vista/7, and there’s a handful that look like Windows 95. You need to know that the display color calibration options in the Settings UI can be overridden by the vendor’s control software (that’s a whole rant), and that what you actually want is a standalone settings window called Color Management. You need to know what operations can be done in Disk Management, Disk Cleanup, Optimize Drives, you need to know that they exist, and you then need to know if the command you want is actually only achievable in
diskpart. I have nothing againstdiskpartbut I can’t tell you which among Terminal, PowerShell, or Windows PowerShell (or any of the x86 variations plural of each of them) is the right place to use it. I can intuitively tell it’s not Windows PowerShell ISE or Azure Cloud Shell though. Yay for computer literacy. I type cmd into the Start menu and it works from there, so I’m content with that. I can’t say Raspberry Pi OS has this many configuration locations but once you know the two or three places to look you’re done.I know that I will have to move to Linux eventually. I’ve only complained about things in Windows that aren’t designed to abuse the users directly, which is a drop in the bucket, ethically at least, when you look at the responsibilities of the world’s most (or second most) influential company regarding personal computing. But I look at all this and feel like it’s accelerating the scary trend of younger people getting worse with computers. I was able to follow instructions correctly in a novel computer environment to set up a mini homelab with a bunch of Linux servers talking to each other. People my own age and slightly younger at work seem to know fuck all about the computers we use and that terrifies me. We were supposed to get better over time, not worse! There’s a new, younger IT guy, he’s not much younger than me, and half of what I’m procedurally required to ask his help on is something he doesn’t understand at all.
Home server mountain hermit life is no longer over the horizon for me, that’s all I can say really.
I disagree. Being able to slap the windows key and type the name of the program I’m looking for is one of my favorite features of both Gnome and KDE and I wish Windows worked similarly.
plus windows is supposed to work just like that.
before windows 10 came around at least.
It does… (Or did I’ve not used 25H2). But given the app starts with a w you can see the issue.
In gnome you can search for any word of a program name and it will appear in the search result
In KDE I type in “tor” and “factorio” appears above “tor browser”
It shows up as “Terminal” in the search results, so I imagine that’s what it matches against, even if it is colloquially referred to as “Windows Terminal”…
Both Gnome and KDE also include a web search. And just like on Linux, you can disable it in Windows Settings.
Both Gnome and KDE also include a web search.
Is it on be default? Because if so I’m glad I don’t use that garbage.
yes but your distro may have it disabled in their default.
On KDE, it’s just one of the suggestions, I believe, that you could search this term on the web. If you trigger that suggestion, it then opens the web browser to do the search.
As such, searching “terminal” wouldn’t yield a suggestion from a web result that matches, but I’m pretty sure applications are prioritized above other results either way.
That’s good to hear. It continuously amazes me how often search bars in some pieces of software manage to be worse than ctrl-f in a plaintext document.
This is how I do it. When I forget that I have it pinned on the taskbar or don’t want to use the mouse. I don’t need it enough on windows to remember the keyboard shortcut.
Terminal the movie seems really obscure
The Tom Hanks one was really good.
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:
Not even a good film.
Not even a good Terminal film.
Yeah, my first thought: not even the Tom Hanks one.
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?
This happens on (mobile) websites all the time. It is infuriating.
The Germans have a word for that, I think they call it Microsoft…
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
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?
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Is Terminal even a Windows app or alias for cmd.exe/PowerShell? I know the joke is how bad the start “menu” is, but maybe they could’ve searched for a real app?
I’m not a Windows user, I’m asking genuinely.
Windows Terminal is the terminal emulator that hosts the shell (cmd or PowerShell, or anything else really). It’s the modern replacement for “conhost”.
It’s also a fantastic app, some of the devs are on Mastodon too.
My only gripe with it is that it’s a store app, meaning the path to the executable is very convoluted. So starting it via a powertoys shortcut is a hassle and I think only works for one specific version until the path changes
they have the preview release on github
i honestly wish they ported it to linux
Windows terminal is actually decent
Windows Terminal is one of the only good things Microsoft has done in ages.
it’s honestly one of the best Terminal Emulators. wish I could get it on Linux in all honesty. I’m sure someone has but I haven’t really looked into it.
Is this true? Can’t be true
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
Windows search sucks balls and does stupid stuff like this all the time. Even when it’s not a web search it might open some file named terminal and not the program terminal. It does that to me all the time at work.
I think that adage used to work… however nowadays, with corporate greed enshittifying everything, I think it’s safe to presume malice by default, at least when the actor is a company. Your neighbor probably didn’t mean to do that thing that made you mad.
They no longer get the ‘benefit of the doubt’ after years of evidence that they will attempt to squeeze every penny out of their customers.
Oh it’s totally malice, like the “reminder” to want to share personal information to MS for a customized user experience, where you your only options are “yes, I want to eat shit” or “sorry, please ask me to eat shit later”
Or how they are clamping on people’s ability to create local accounts.
It has for a decade, since Windows 10 basically.
I believe you can disable the dumb search providers.
I would allow remote assistance… from that actress.
Don’t be a creep
BONK!
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.
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
Afaik PowerToys has this Spotlight ripoff which searches for apps.
Yeah I don’t know why people who call going on the internet without using uBlock rawdogging use windows without running some script to gut all of this trash.
It’s based on an older version of Vox:
On first glace I thought I’d be looking at the UI of a streaming service. This is so awful
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
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.
… You need Windows to use government websites? What kind of dystopian nightmare is this
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.
Honestly would be kind of great.
This is still the case for many South Korean shits, tho these days you can also use a (Googled) Android or iOS device with some shitty app.
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.
wait till you find out companies that operated in South Korea had to support Internet Explorer until 2020
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.
Not knowing much about Serbian smartcards, but I had done quite a bit with smartcards in Linux before.
Have you seen this project? https://github.com/ubavic/bas-celik … looks to be cross-platform and do what you’re saying. Though you’d probably need pcscd, pcsc-tools, and possibly other similar packages, depending distro.
Wow, thank you. No, I was not aware of it, sounds like together with srb-id-pkcs11 it should do the trick, it will be wonderful to finally move my auth from windows vm.
Yes, smart card reader itself should work, the only problem is encryption of key on card and use of that key with website. That module mentioned above exactly the thing that required it seems.
Still, my point stands, cause project was created just two years ago and isn’t official in the first place. Unfortunately, government itself have no desire to support other platforms. :c
Ah if you want to use it on their website or in a browser you’ll probably also need a mini card driver like OpenSC.
And if you’re using firefox, you might have to go into settings to add a pkcs provider and tell it where
opensc-pkcs11.sois.There’s lots of generic info out there on smartcards in Linux if you were so inclined to “figure it out”…but I don’t blame them for not “supporting” Linux…that’s kind of a minefield.
Still, that’s the fun of Linux…realizing that “not supported” doesn’t mean it won’t work…just that they won’t help you.
tbf if you didn’t update fedora for 6 months you may aswell downlaod a new iso and they also do the windows reboot screens for no reason
Thinkpad is the tank of laptops.
@mod_pp They can’t even suggest the better (Tom Hanks) Terminal movie.
