I will say, network drives feel local on Windows. On macOS they feel like network drives. I think I’d say the same about external drives. I stopped using them, because I got sick of waiting for them to spin up anytime Finder had to do some work.
Up until 7, and even afterward in some areas, Windows got things right from an interface standpoint. People seem to forgot that Microsoft dumped large amounts of time and money into figuring out how people use computers and developed their desktop environment accordingly. I've used Windows, macOS, and more Linux DEs than I care to admit. The only thing that tops the Windows DE is KDE, which isn't a massive departure from Windows. macOS has legacy as an excuse, but I don't know what can be said about the various Linux DEs that don't Work Right for the sake of spiting ideas that do.
Windows 11 has pretty severely fucked up Explorer. Named directories can't have their path copied (I think 10 did this bullshit, too). The context menu getting insane whitespace, missing options, and having things dynamically load into it is a travesty. It is heartbreaking that mobile-inspired trash is ultimately going to be way you're forced to interact with a computer.
People let their distaste for somebody's bad behavior and/or old things stop them from admitting that we're in a pretty severe backward slide.
Dynamically-loaded context options (with any user-perceptible lag whatsoever) has to be one the greatest UX sins I can think of. Like apps stealing focus on startup (looking at you, Adobe!)
About that part... Modern computers are insanely fast. How does every single piece of software manages to fill half a minute of CPU or disk I/O for enumerating some 3 or 4 items?
It's absurd.
I use Firefox inside eatmydata nowadays, because it spends 10 minutes enumerating the same 2 directories every time it starts up (hundreds of thousands of times). The start menu and equivalents everywhere are already famous. Windows can't search files nowadays, not only it doesn't work, but it never ends either... The list is endless.
> I use Firefox inside eatmydata nowadays, because it spends 10 minutes enumerating the same 2 directories every time it starts up (hundreds of thousands of times).
What have you got like a 10 year old profile or something?
Librewolf starts up instantly for me, and I saw no performance difference using eatmdata.
Why would an old profile cause it to be scanned hundreds of thousands of times? (Yeah, I'm resetting it next time just in case... 10 years is amateur's numbers :) )
Anyway, there are a lot of people reporting the same thing on the internet. I've found 3 different bugs opened for the same thing.
But yeah, as far as I remember, Iceweasel doesn't do it either. Maybe I should change my browser.
Hmm. Wasn't it completely unreliable for moving around large numbers of files at the same time? Like if file #243 of 400 failed for some reason, you could actually lose data?
I don't know any more because I use Total Commander on Windows...
It could be done quickly by reading the MFT. WizTree can calculate the size of all 236k directories/800k files on my system in two seconds. For some reason, Explorer takes ~10 seconds to calculate the size of a single directory (Program Files, 17k directories, 240k files). If Explorer just did what WizTree does, it could actually show and sort by directory sizes.