> Windows does it, too, I guess

No, it generates thumbnails outside the main UI thread; sometimes it's a bit slow in so doing, but I've never seen it hang an Explorer window, regardless of file size or quantity. (Windows 7, but it would astonish me to learn that 10 displays a regression here.)

> No, it generates thumbnails outside the main UI thread; sometimes it's a bit slow in so doing, but I've never seen it hang an Explorer window,

As an example of the contrary, I've seen misbehaving third party thumbnail-providers cause Windows explorer to crash entirely.

Only way to "fix" it was to install the software which added the thumbnail-provider, or go into the folder via cmd.exe and rename the file you "knew" caused issued to a different extension while doing the operation you originally came to do.

That may have been on Windows 7 though. I don't know for sure if this weakness still exists in Windows 10.

If the third-party thumbnailer is implemented as a shared library (DLL) that Explorer is configured to load, then sure, a segfault or similar in the library will kill the whole process. Not sure how that's Microsoft's fault. Sure, there's an argument that loading a library is the wrong model, but there's a performance tradeoff, especially given Windows' relatively slow IPC capabilities. The real surprise here is that Linux manages to be comparably slow, but when you complicate a simple, fast IPC model with dbus and a million other middleware layers, I suppose it starts to make more sense.

I'm not excusing the Linux implementation for being slow, which I agree it sometimes is (Hello Dropbox and my huge, flat "Camera uploads" folder...).

I'm just saying that I've seen bad things happen on Windows too. Not blaming Microsoft, just saying that in a typical end-user scenario with lots of randomly installed software, you will have Explorer break too.

Basically the grass is rotten everywhere :)

That's not the problem, most DE file managers use an external process too (via dbus), but it's still slow, even on an SSD or when the cache has alredy been generated.

They're also buggy, XFCEs thumbnailer thumblerd (also used in LXDE and probably others) used to have memory leaks when it encountered video files with unknown codecs, newer versions re-scan the entire cache every time you delete/move a directory, making quite a bit of disk IO.

I've found simpler file managers like rox-filer, pcmanfm to be much faster at thumbnailing.

The rox video thumbnailer is basically a script that runs ffmpeg to extract the first keyframe or some such.

It's pretty well known. There are several workarounds.

One is to optimise view for general, not images or video or sound.

Another is to "reset your folders"

http://superuser.com/questions/1097394/windows-10-download-f...

There's a suggestion that that has less to do with inherent issues and more with wanting to display more information than can be obtained from whatever the Windows API calls stat(2). An indexer can actually help a great deal here, but I don't know if that's actually the issue - I should be getting a work-issued Windows 10 box pretty soon here, and look forward to experimenting for myself.

That said, even the slowness under discussion doesn't actually hang the UI thread. That's something you have to be pretty special to get so badly wrong, in this day and age where even web devs are learning better than to do expensive work in the main thread, and have the tools available to avoid doing so.

Might another option be to have the default view be "List"? I'm not sure if that's possible, but I've been wanting to do this for years.

In everything from XP through 7, you can. Select the view you want to make default, then press Alt to display and activate the menubar. In the Tools menu, choose Folder Options; on the View tab, click Apply to All Folders. Current Explorer windows may need to be closed and reopened to show the change; all newly opened windows from now on will take the view you chose as their default, but also remember any changes you make to a given folder's view.

I generally prefer Details view myself, but know no reason why this shouldn't work for List or any other. Enjoy!

Well, Windows 10 has become a form of spyware out of the box, it sends information about what one types and does to Microsoft. They use dark patterns so that users don't disable it and stick to the defaults.

macOS is also very chatty, but privacy is usually given more consideration. Not at all as bad as MS.

"macOS ... privacy is usually given more consideration"

Definitely not my feeling last time I upgraded macOs: I had to give my full name, address, * phone number * and * * bank details * * while the upgrade is free of cost.

I don't like having these details hanging on server somewhere on Internet when it is not needed.

I felt like my profile was given a lost of consideration by Apple, not my privacy.

Yeah * you don't have to enter your * bank account, there's instructions on the * Apple site.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204034

You have to * when installing a free MacOS upgrade *: you can create an Apple id without a payment method; you can probably remove the payment method after you enter one...

... But when installing or downloading MacOS, with the current (tested in January this year in Europe) Apple policy, the system will not let you continue with a 'none' payment method.

I was just thinking much the same - these things are a good reason to keep to minimal desktop environments and full control of the system.

My only interaction with "Tracker" has been to figure out how to disable it and get it off the system, as it was doing god-knows what and pegging processors. I can (and do) happily exist without apport.

I know this doesn't make me safe per se, but I do think that in becoming more windows-like and 'integrated' we end up with these unintended consequences.

Just a small comment on why the desktop environment might need to parse such a file: How about sorting music files according to their real length? Many desktop environments support such a feature, and users like those features, too.

Sure, they're features. Some people like the features. I'm getting old and cranky. My thinking is that I have a program to index and play my music library...I don't need the desktop to know anything about my music, except which program to load when I click a music file. (I've been amazed at how awful this experience still is on Windows...every time you install an application, it'll seemingly try to take over as many file extensions as possible. Microsoft apps, in particular, are egregious about this practice.)

And they need to do this, why?

Even if the user wants to do this, seems like a good thing to have off by default

Nobody talked about qubes os - one great out of the box linux desktop: www​.qubes-os.org

If you are using nautilus, I don't think it's the thumbnailing.

Try opening /usr/bin and it takes longer than you would expect.

From what I remember nautilus does excessive stat calls, looking for thumbnails - it could definitely be much faster.

The standard KDE/Qt based filemanager (forgot name) is much quicker even with showing the details. Meaning, Nautilus is just very inefficient as that other filemanager is able to show things much more quickly.

That's KDE Dolphin, has been improved a lot over the last few years.

KDE in general has been in good shape, better than GNOME 3 in my opinion. I've been using GNOME 2 and GNOME 3 (up to 3.8 when they completely got rid of fallback mode) for about 10 years, always felt that Nautilus as a file manager was basic and useless.

I switched back to KDE 4 (AFAIR it was 4.10 at that time), the desktop search and index implementation - NEPOMUK (what a bad name) had big performance issues when doing the inital indexing and when it does periodic indexing the desktop simply choke. It took a while to search for tips and best practices to settle it down. Later on I decided to completely disable that as I don't need it...

Later on KDE switched to a new search and indexing engine called Baloo, it seems that the design is better and configuration is more straightforward but I still cannot justify, disabled ;-)

In short, have been running Linux as my main desktop / workstation OS for 15 years, I come to a conclusion that OOTB (most distros) setup is not ideally optimized and secure for Linux Ninja, it takes time and effort to tune the system to suite your personal standard / taste (Now I run Arch Linux on most of my devices).