| > 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! |
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.