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ungreased0675today at 11:59 AM3 repliesview on HN

I run headless Alpine Linux (a minimal distro) in my homelab and it’s fast AF. The lag in Windows Explorer is sad when something like cd folder/folder is instant in Linux.


Replies

marginalia_nutoday at 12:58 PM

I really don't understand how you can even create software that feels as bad to use as Windows Explorer. It's like it's barely attached to reality. There's this weird floaty delay in everything. You copy a file, or did you? You're not sure. It hasn't updated yet. Oh, now the copy dialog appears with this progress bar that isn't showing progress. The dialog just sits there. Is something happening? I don't know. Many seconds later the dialog closes. But it hasn't showed up in the window yet... oh, now it did!

How is that even possible, especially with modern hardware? Like you'd almost have to build the file explorer around like a sqlite-based message queue with a 1500ms poll interval to get performance characteristics like this. Absolutely insane feats of architecture astronautism are no doubt required for this to happen.

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prodigalknighttoday at 12:21 PM

To be fair, cd folder/folder is also instant in a command line in Windows, it's just the GUI aspects that are slow. Comparing Windows Explorer to a terminal is comparing apples to oranges.

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sgarlandtoday at 12:43 PM

I don’t think I’ve ever noticed a difference in speed on the terminal between distros. Shells (or more accurately, plugins / frameworks - I recently gave up oh-my-zsh in favor of zimfw for that reason), yes, but not the terminal itself.