[stevesimmons]

I can't figure out how to reach my files in Windows 11.

There are around 6 Documents folders/libraries/whatever in File Explorer, going to a combination of my work OneDrive, my personal OneDrive and my local user folder. There's one weird Documents that goes to the Documents in both OneDrives. There's a My Documents that give an error. I've a work Sharepoint folder that was also named Documents. I tried renaming them, which didn't work, and has just left me even more confused how to find things. If I go to the command line and do "dir C:\Users\<me>\Documents" which of this do I find? And how do I get to the others? And which ones get backed up where?

It's a complete mess. I sympathise now with the people who keep every file on the desktop.

Every time I go back to Linux, I feel a wave of relief: I see my files in a single dir tree under /home, searching works predictably.

How did Microsoft get to this?

[soco]

I installed Everything, disabled Windows search/indexing and I always start working with files from there. Windows Explorer is simply not worth the hassle.

[C19is20]

I use the portable (no install) version of Everything. http://www.voidtools.com/

[UI_at_80x24]

Don't let MS tell you where to save your files. C:\docs (or similar) will always work (until nothing is stored locally).

Avoid the "My Computer" paradigm.

[robomartin]

All of our development machines have multiple drives mapped to specific functionality:

    C: System
    D: Data (business data and main work area for product design data)
    F: Library (stuff you rarely touch, PDF's, books, references, "knowledgebase", etc.)
    G: Backup (external)
    S: Swap and Scratch Files (this is actually a RAM-based 128 GB drive for speed)
    Z: Development (mostly for web development, VM storage, etc.)

The idea is that the C drive can be taken out and shredded and the most valuable part of the computer, the data, is unharmed. Decades ago I learned --the hard way-- that storing your data on the same drive as the OS/system files is a dangerous thing.

The other thing this facilitates is backup. You can backup and restore each of the logical/functional units separately, as full drives.

This also makes upgrading the system or the entire computer far simpler. The separation between OS and data makes it so.

Way back when, before the registry was a thing, you could upgrade your OS without having to reinstall the applications. While I understand the advantages of common DLL's and the centralized management of common settings and code, I do miss the ability to not only separate data from the OS, but also applications. I don't think that is ever coming back.

[dragonwriter]

> S: Swap and Scratch Files (this is actually a RAM-based 128 GB drive for speed

Isn't it better to just have the RAM as RAM than to have the same RAM used to provide swap space on a RAM disk?

[sneusse]

Thats what made me smile to :) Swap trying to swap RAM to RAM then suddemly: swap recursion :)

[robomartin]

Sure, yet, it depends on what you are doing.

One of the primary motivations for using a RAM disk was to not beat-up SSD's with the kind of access swap space gets.

The advantage of a hardware RAM-based drive is that it is extremely fast. When these machines were built, this was the fastest way to get data on and off a swap drive.

Today SSD's are super fast. On some machines we now have a separate dedicated 250 GB SSD for swap. If it craps out, you throw it away and pop in a new one. No worries about comingling valuable data with swap space.

[ChuckNorris89]

This^.

I still have my muscle memory tuned to creating and using only:

  C:\Games
  C:\Music
  C:\Movies
  C:\Pictures
  C:\Torrents
  C:\Workspace

I hate the default

  C:\Users\ChuckNorris89\Pictures\ or whatever.

Much prefer the linux ~/Pictures instead.

Or maybe this just shows how old I am.

[salamandersauce]

Well ~ is basically just a shortcut to /users/ChuckNorris89. It's kind of surprising MS hasn't mapped ~ to go to basically the Windows home folder. In R on Windows you can use ~ to go there at least which is nice.

[RReverser]

FWIW ~ works in PowerShell too.

[willis936]

  %CSIDL_MYPICTURES%
  %USERPROFILE%\Pictures

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/deployment/usmt/usm...

You can also add your own environment variables.

  setx pix "%SYSTEMROOT%\Pictures"

[YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo]

It works great but you won't escape the merriad of system folders in Documents or Pictures that way. Apps, games and the OS itself flooding these folders is the main problem why file management on Windows sucks.

[vips7L]

That even happens on Linux. Apps dump a thousand little files in ~.

Distros and package managers putting binaries in completely different spots. Is it /bin, /usr/bin, /usr/sbin? Who knows!

[kilburn]

> /bin, /usr/bin, /usr/sbin? Who knows!

If anyone is curious:

Historically /bin and /sbin contained the binaries that were necessary to bring up the system (especially to mount the /usr partition, which was "best practice" to have separately from the root and /boot partitions). Nowadays most distros just symlink them to /usr/(s)bin

/usr/sbin is for utilites that only root should use, whereas /usr/bin is for regular applications managed by your system (i.e.: your distro's default package manager).

[sigzero]

I prefer the short paths myself. I create something similar and add it to the quick access in explorer.

[NullPrefix]

>Avoid the "My Computer" paradigm.

My Computer paradigm is long gone. They call it "This Computer" or just "Computer" now. There is no "My".

[userbinator]

I believe that started around Vista/7 and is a very telling sign of whose computer they really think it is now.

[V-2]

I understand this is (probably) a tongue-in-cheek comment, but the "My" prefix was infantile and terrible for scanning the alphabetically ordered list of folders ("My Documents", "My Music", "My Whatever"), so dropping this nonsense feels like a step in the right direction.

It still baffles me though how the Windows designers assumed it would be a great idea to bless me with a predefined "3D Objects" folder (right under "This PC"), which comes at the top of the list due to alphabetical ordering, and can't be removed. I wonder what percentage of users actually need this.

[robotnikman]

IIRC they introduced that one around 2012, when 3D printing was taking off and was thought to be the next big thing

[cjbgkagh]

They start off by being very bad at search, they then compound the issue by creating the Library concept that transparency blends multiple nodes in the tree structure together. Then they make it needlessly slow.

[sideshowb]

I finally caved into the pressure and started using onedrive instead of local storage, but STILL it seems to take umpteen clicks to load/save from office. Is there any way to navigate the onedrive folder hierarchy without clicking through to the old file dialog? If there is I haven't found it.

[KronisLV]

> It's a complete mess. I sympathise now with the people who keep every file on the desktop.

The UI in regards to navigating files in Windows is indeed a mess. A personal gripe that i have with it, that's even worse than some of what you named is the file open/save dialog - there's not just one (that would let you write the file path in the bar and thus allow you to copy paths from Explorer to it), but many different ones for different programs! This essentially makes it so that using some software like GIMP and navigating around the filesystem with it is needlessly annoying!

Add on small annoyances like Windows search by default trying to look into the contents of many files, thus making search needlessly slow and also things like it not supporting mounting remote directories over SFTP (which should get at least a bit of attention) instead of always having to use SMB or whatever, and you have a somewhat problematic daily experience.

Of course, there are also things that it does better than some other systems/configurations, like having the whole recycle bin concept, with ctrl+Z allowing you to undo file deletions, file moves or even renaming files, which makes dealing with user error on your part more easy! Just checked on Linux Mint - the recycle bin works as you'd expect, but there is no ctrl+z to restore the last deleted file automatically.

> Every time I go back to Linux, I feel a wave of relief: I see my files in a single dir tree under /home, searching works predictably.

About this, i'm also somewhat torn. The filesystem structure on most Linux distros also just feels weird, although it's for historical compatibility reasons (not quite as bad as Windows having two oddly named Program Files directories, but still). I doubt that we couldn't structure things in a more reasonable manner, than having all of the following for just executables, for example:

  /bin/
  /sbin/
  /usr/bin/
  /usr/local/bin/
  /usr/local/sbin/

In case anyone wants to learn more about these, here's the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard document, which is actually pretty well written: https://www.pathname.com/fhs/

Throw in /opt and /usr/share and whatnot and it's a recipe for different bits of software out there using different configurations because of differing opinions about what would be suitable for their use cases. The same mess actually extends to what's in the /home directory - sure, in most cases you can back it up and restore it, but once again every piece of software will have its own opinions about how to structure its data, be it in a visible/hidden config file, a visible/hidden folder for the application itself, or something else.

Of course, Windows also has a similar mess going on with Program Data and AppData folders, as well as Documents and whatnot, so Linux isn't the only problematic system here.

In short, i think that all have their advantages and shortcomings, here's hoping that things improve in the following decade!

[CRConrad]

> not quite as bad as Windows having two oddly named Program Files directories, but still

At least three, if you inclde "Roaming\Appdata" (or is it "Appdata\Roaming"?), which is also a program files directory nowadays.

As for Linux, yeah... Either stick with the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard, or -- if it's time to revolutionise the directory structure -- maybe something like what GoboLinux (et al?) are doing.

[tremon]

On my Guix systems, I've gone full obstinate idiot:

- / is on tmpfs

- the OS is mounted on /gnu

- system data is mounted on /var (and /etc is populated from /var/etc)

- user data is mounted on /usr

This way, I can avoid the plethora of separate tmpfs filesystems on most distro's (at least /dev, /run, /tmp, /dev/shm).

But I'm not running any desktop systems on Guix right now, just service containers. I'm would expect there to be plenty of Linux desktop software that can't handle /usr being for user data.

[soco]

I went the Everything way and gave up trying to remember what is where. Not a perfect solution but a huge productivity bump for me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_(software)

[iggldiggl]

> The UI in regards to navigating files in Windows is indeed a mess. A personal gripe that i have with it, that's even worse than some of what you named is the file open/save dialog - there's not just one (that would let you write the file path in the bar and thus allow you to copy paths from Explorer to it),

Note that even in the older-style file dialogs, that don't have that new (relatively speaking) breadcrumbs-style file path display at the top (like in Windows Explorer), you can still paste a path into the file name input box and it'll navigate to that folder. Relative paths also work. The only drawback is that the file name will then be reset to whatever it was when the dialog was initially opened, but other than that it works nicely.

> but many different ones for different programs! This essentially makes it so that using some software like GIMP and navigating around the filesystem with it is needlessly annoying!

The problem is a) backwards compatibility – programs can customise the file open/save dialogs to quite some extent, so they need to explicitly opt into using the new dialogs. Plus software that wanted to support older Windows versions (pre-Vista, so these days it's probably not that relevant any more, but during the Vista/7-era it definitively mattered) then needs to have code to handle both kinds of file dialogs. b) as far as I can tell, some cross platform frameworks use completely self-written file dialogs, which 1) usually mimic the older (Windows XP and older) style of Windows' dialogs and b) usually don't manage to copy all the features of Windows' native file dialogs, and instead often get some things subtly (or less subtly) wrong.

My personal gripe with the breadcrumbs file path navigation is that the breadcrumbs dropdowns don't support keyboard navigation like the main explorer window (or the file list in the file open/save dialogs) does, so when you have a folder with lots of subfolders and want to use the breadcrumbs to change the path, you then need to do lots of scrolling instead of simply being able to press a key.

[bkallus]

Agreed that Linux directory structure is kind of a mess. The extent to which it's a mess varies from distribution to distribution, though. For example, on Arch, /bin, /sbin, and /usr/sbin are all just symlinks to /usr/bin.