Terminal > Windows Registry.
Web search on the start menu.
🤮
Web in the search, AI in the search, personal assistant in your files, things in your things that you don’t want, didn’t ask for and are struggling to extract.
things in your things that you don’t want, didn’t ask for and are struggling to extract.
We have a word for these. It’s called “parasites.”
I wouldn’t mind that as an optional function, having a single global search field that brings up whatever you are looking for seems really convenient on paper.
Of course not the way msoft does it, where you never get the thing you want unless you are being really precise (like searching for appdata only yielding web results until you specifically type %APPDATA%).
For about a year or two, windows had an amazing search from the menu that used a blazing fast index search to search files, directories, and file contents locally and almost instantaneously. It was a glorious thing.
I cannot think of a case in which a user would not need to distinguish between web search and file search (other than the convenience of a single click). I do use a unified search on my phone that includes files, apps, and contacts, and if it’s not in any of those, it will launch a web search using the query. That is more than adequate. If it were performing the web search in real time, I wouldn’t be able to easily access apps and contacts, and the results would slow and change while typing.
I remember that, pretty sure it was in win7 or early win10, before they crammed cortana in there and you had to start jumping through hoops to disable all the garbage they added.
As for the search results, I’m not saying the user shouldn’t be able to distinguish them; in fact the way I imagine it is that the results are grouped by category and in a user determined order of priority.
For the loading times I have nothing, that isnt really avoidable with my idea.
Perhaps with some visual trickery that fades or slides the results in over a second or two, ending on the web results. It would give the web search part time to run behind the scenes, seemingly appearing as quickly as the others.
Part of the issue with web results is that it would generally update as you type which is just a bad fit for a general menu search. I personally don’t see a place for it. If you are searching the web, you’re going to open the browser anyway. Maybe some users would use it to navigate directly to common websites, sort of like bookmarks? I don’t know.
That’s why KDE Plasma just makes the searches shortcuts in a similar manner to the !bang feature of duckduckgo. Though it’d be nice if the used
!in the shortcuts alies by default. !ddg is just more reliable than ddg.
Its even worse than that. It is completely unpredictable and just does what it want. When I type in “Vi”, the first choice is Visual Studio. It will stay on Visual Studio until I have typed in “Visual Studi”. But if I’m a fast typer, and I type in the entirety of “Visual Studio”, it opens Visual Studio Code.
So the fastest way to open up Code is to type “VSC”. This doesn’t work with “VS” for Visual Studio.
I have to type out “Spot” specifically to open Spotify. Typing out Spotify opens edge.
There are also files and programs it cannot find despite having been installed for years, even though I’ve MANUALLY added the paths to the searched directories.
If anyone of you is on Windows for whatever reason and want your mind blown, try downloading a little program called Everything. It can literally find every single program on your computer as fast as you can type. And it looks up exactly what you type in. It also supports wildcard characters etc. This is the kind of behavior I expect from my computer. Sure, make a shiny frontend for casual users who don’t need to see every single file on their system, but please, why do I have to go through third parties to get this experience on an OS that my company paid for, when I can get the same experience out of the box on any free Linux distro?
I honestly thought I was the only one that has those problems. I think the thing that gets me is when you install a program, the installer closes, you don’t know where in gods name it just installed to, so you type the name of the program and windows is like “sorry never heard of it”, so you go to the programs list and it’s right there.
What you mentioned is particularly frustrating because I too will type full program names and it often switches on the very last letter. It’s even more frustrating that the user can’t manipulate the search by typing a few letters, realizing those letters are shared by two programs, and then typing a few more letters to lead it to your program without moving to the mouse. Instead it acts like you’ve added no info and recommends the same thing.
Also if you go to uninstall a program by right clicking it in start or search and instead of uninstalling it presents you with a list of programs which you then have to go find the program again in and then hit uninstall again. Been that way for 8 years now.
Powertoys Run is really good as well, and developed by MS which is just en extra layer of absurdism considering how bad the start menu search is. I mapped powertoys Run to the windows key and have not looked at the start menu since, literally.
One thing Linux needs to do is change the perception of how hard everything is compared to Windows. Some things are extremely less difficult on Linux.
Problem is is that is that too many people insist on doing things the Windows way and they get frustrated because of it. For example, instead of going to the software center, they choose to download their programs from a website, even though that’s not how you’re supposed to do it most of the time. They’ll also spend hours trying to get Windows only programs to run, when there are alternatives available that work just as well.
That’s absolutely true. I made the same mistakes and I got absolutely mad.
I still don’t fully know how to install rpm files lmao, that’s how I learned about Apt back on linux mint, don’t remember what I was trying to install as it was like 15 years ago. Deb files were nice because they did work like a windows user would expect.
I don’t even know what rpm files are xD. I personally havent figured out how to make use of a tar.gz file.
A tar file is similar to a ZIP file. The easiest way to uncompress them is by using your file manager and right clicking.
I know, but since Programms often ship as tar.gz I still have no fucking clue on how to finally install a Programm from it.
Let’s use Tor Browser as an example since that’s one of the programs that typically gets installed with a tarball. Once you’ve downloaded and extracted the tarball, you’ll want to navigate to the extracted files. You can do this in the terminal using CD commands, but I think it’s easier and a little more intuitive to just use your file manager and navigate to the folder that way. Once you’re in the correct folder, you’ll want to right click on an empty space and select “open and terminal.” Now you’ll have a terminal open and it will already be in the correct directory. From here you’ll want to run the “start-tor-browser.desktop” script. To do this, simply type ./start-tor-browser.desktop and you’ll be able to follow along from there.
Running programs from a Tar image typically involves running a script. You just have to change the name of the script to match whatever they have in the directory. Auto complete is your friend here. You don’t have to actually type the entire name of the script, you only need to type the first few letters and then hit tab.
