Jonathan Blow on Windows File Explorer in 2023

Jonathan Blow accesses the latest changes to Windows File Explorer.

Captured from a j_blow twitch stream in April 2023.

[zboy]

I'm with him. The opaque nature of these folder links where you don't really know where you are in the directory structure, combined with hiding file extensions by default were probably thought to make things simpler for the average user. But they're just confusing. Even Win 95 had a more transparent Explorer.

[boskovicboris]

About Windows: Yesterday I was looking for an option in the settings, and after a while, I found a label with the exact name of the action I wanted to take, but instead of giving me the setting it opened their browser with that search term. It's so bad, it's mind-blowing.

[Jkmsyytttllmhgccf]

It's not just the file explorer, the whole OS is like this, they add and remove features seemingly at random and rearrange settings every other update. Often without updating their website.

Then when you find your setting, it opens in another window with an XP or win7 theme, how is that even possible!?

[wisnoskij]

The funny thing is I am pretty sure he does not evne realise how broken the home folder is. Their is also like a onedrive home folder. When I first installed the latest Windows, I accidentally was putting stuff in my onedrive home folder and then could not find them. Only to figure out that their are two ways to access your user directors and one is an online version and the other in on your harddrive.

[anndev]

as a current summer intern, i felt that blow deep in my soul (pun intended)

[filiformis]

4:19 You can see in his face that he's genuinely considering building an operating system.

[adammontgomery]

I think what they did was make Documents a link to OneDrive so that cloud storage was transparent. Sorry, but most of us would like to decide when to store something in the cloud rather than do that by default.

[SaHaRaSquad]

THIS. Microsoft probably doesn't realise how much such small but terrible decisions can impact the user experience. If you want to limit how the user can interact with your system you should have a really good reason for it and do it in a way that makes sense. But MS is unable to do that because they have no respect for the user.

[J-_-L]

Fired with extreme prejudice! YES! Finally someone speaking the truth on the internet.

[platotle]

The windows filesystem is the one thing that keeps me from ever using it. I've been using windows my whole life, I know how the filesystem works. I just don't ever want to have to deal with it. There is so much junk everywhere that doing things as simple as photo or video editing feel like the grossest thing because of how many things you have to sift through to get to what you want. It seriously keeps me from every being productive or wanting to do anything on the system. I really would love things like the adobe suite on linux, but I'm perfectly willing to forego them because I'd never want to use them on Windows when they're installed. Everything is so crummy and heavy. If I could I'd probably switch to Mac, but I can't really justify buying a MacBook for now. I'm so much more productive on linux than windows just because I can organize my files in a way that makes sense. I wonder how many amazing things that more people around the world would have able to do if Windows had an interface that invited productivity, like Mac OS and many linux DE's do, and allowed them to actually be able to discover and learn apps without having to worry about a filesystem and interface where you can't find anything you want.

[inertia_dagger]

I always pin the actual home folder on any new windows install, it's too painful to use otherwise

[Exilum]

The links being broken seems to be a local issue. Probably broke when upgrading the windows version. These folders have a default path, but it can be user-defined. If the folder it points to (not the link/registry path) was deleted, it can't be opened. A simple fix is checking the path the folder is set to and just add the missing folder

[LudicrousAvian]

bro just pin the home folder to the sidebar

[John]

3:57, he was contemplating the idea of taking over windows for a very long second

[everalert]

You can access the user folder by clicking the right arrow on the address bar between the icon and "This PC" and selecting it from the dropdown. Not that that is good design either and you kinda just have to know about it, but it's not like you need any black magic or to do an expedition or whatever to get there.

[ethanaa]

I had the exact same frustration just a few days ago lol. It really does boggle the mind.

[teahousereloaded]

I'm on my first Pc after growing up on Mac OS (i need cuda gpu) and the pain is immeasurable. There are five ways/buttons to go back/up and none of them works properly.

[briananeuraysem]

Can they just re-write explorer to actually not lag when I have a folder with more than 50 things in it?

[AshnSilvercorp]

tiny reasons why I don't use Windows anymore...

[abdulmasaiev]

Here's my addition to "how bad is Windows Explorer?". I don't really use the desktop for icons and such, so for a while I was just saving random "I just need to put this somewhere" nonsense there since it was an easy option in the save-as menu. This obviously ballooned to the point of the desktop being unusable for launching apps or whatever, but that's fine, I wasn't using it anyway. This is a problem you'd expect.

The problem you wouldn't expect is when I connected my laptop to a multimonitor dock. Explorer just kept repeatedly crashing whenever I did anything explorer-related on the desktop, like right click somewhere to change the display settings. Yeah turns out something about having those many icons doesn't play well specifically with multiple monitors. Creating a new folder STILL ON THE DESKTOP and moving everything into it completely fixed the crashes. Wild shit.