I really can't tell if you mean "Explorer.exe is good enough and I never felt like it needed improvement" or "Oh, I can make anything I want to, with free tools? This is great! I'll make a file manager for my personal usage that's perfect for me."
The former. You use one DE, typeahead triggers full text search. You use another, no metadata like image width/height when selecting images. You use a third one, no folder thumbnails.
It's baffling that you can't see that what OP is getting at is that there is not in fact any 'file manager he likes'. 50 half baked solutions are just that - half baked solutions.
"Just learn hundreds of different tools, spend dozens of hours reading all their man pages, understand all their limitations, and pick the correct one before starting your task, all so you can accomplish something completely ancillary to the task you actually want done. Geez, it's not hard."
Unfortunately, just because you have choices that doesn't mean those choices are good.
I was forced to the file explorer on Windows, and the file explorer was good so I didn't mind. I was also forced to use MS Paint. And it was good for a long time, until they added layers. Now my primary use case of it (pasting an image and cropping it) doesn't work as well as it used to.
On Linux I don't even have that choice. There are choices, yes, but none of them do what I want anyway.
What truly drives me insane is that if you say "I just want what Windows does" people tell you that it's not Windows, it's "different(tm)." Then you ask why do Linux software sucks in comparison to Windows, and you get told "well, it's because Windows has $ to spend in R&D." So it's double-think. Developers are aware proprietary software spends tons of money they don't have in R&D, and yet they shy away from just copying the results because they don't want to be Windows.
I just want Windows, but with freedom. I don't want "different" if it's not going to be better.
> Then you ask why do Linux software sucks in comparison to Windows, and you get told "well, it's because Windows has $ to spend in R&D."
Are there actually people who claim this? Microsoft has plenty of money but the premise that they use it to improve the user experience seems contrary to evidence.
When something sucks on Linux with no alternatives it's usually because most people don't use the feature you want, e.g. because there is another way to do the same thing and more people are doing it that way, and then no one bothers to make thing you want because their desire to have that is already being satisfied by something else.
Of course, one of the choices you have is to build the thing you want yourself, which is why it works out that way. The chances of someone having done that go up the more people want it to exist. When the number is low, you have to decide if you want it enough for the person who makes it for everyone to be you. And it's fine if your answer is no, but now you know why that thing doesn't exist.
"Choice is bad because I might have opinions and then instead of the computer saying no I might switch to software that better suits my preferences. I just want a corporation to tell me what to want"
It’s more like, “I already have opinions and preferences and despite the various options available, none of them suit me well and so choosing any one results in a high degree of compromise, and so the next best thing is using a different one depending on the circumstance which brings its own compromises.”
A couple clicks through to older lcamtuf posts and I came across this in the "what is electricity" post:
> Once again, we don’t have a satisfying explanation why. We know that these quantum numbers correspond to standing-wave solutions of a three-dimensional wave function that we pulled out of thin air. We also know that the model works better than any alternatives. But we don’t know what any of it really means — or if it means anything.
It is so refreshing to see this explicated thus; physics textbooks are generally coy about "know this for now, and there will be deeper insights available later" but they typically never level with readers and say "we don't know".
Oddly enough, one of my upper level math textbooks (maybe real analysis, don't remember) said the same thing about the definition of a set, except that "later" meant graduate school.
lcamtuf is one of the smartest people I've ever seen. When you read his work you realize he's only sort of putting about 1% of his intelligence on the page.
> The answer was simple in hindsight. It just kept looking until it found it
This is how I usually characterize AI to friends who have no background in computers: it's an indefatigable (that is, not able to be fatigued) employee who has read nearly everything in the world, who does make mistakes, but who never lacks for motivation.
Most humans would become discouraged after being told 20 times that their work fell short, but AI agents will persevere en masse until the oceans are boiled, for better or for worse.
People who are new to skiing/snowboarding are often surprised that their faces get sunburned, because of course it's cold and so how could they get burned
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