mintty can do some things better than many terminals on Linux, even: https://mintty.github.io/mintty-gnuplot.png
How did they work around the console limitations of older Windows?
Also, the transparent effects didn't help anything and look silly in hindsight. They also took out color customization and you couldn't have a dark theme for the next ten years!
Of course the type ahead search in the Start menu was a big improvement, and elevation for security. But as always one step forward, two steps back with modern Windows.
One of my favourite is how it overrules me in renaming a file. Half way into renaming it decides I will not rename it and just clears my editing, or exits editing mode. Refreshes or something, ruining what I do along the way. Renaming files is a hit or miss thing, unpridictable. Something pretty essential thing solved pretty well more than half a century ago, managed to be ruined by MS.
Or how about Modern office programs, where saving something to disk instead of the cloud is now many clicks away.
They have to break your workflow for their bonus.
The auto sort by date and group by most recent in their file explorer that you have to either use a third party app to turn back into sort by name and group by none, or - do that selection for literally every folder on its own.
That's a fucking train wreck. Who decided that sorting by date instead of name was a good idea? WHY?
It depends on the context. Sometimes when I'm looking at photos, I really do prefer sorting by date. Similarly, when I'm looking at the Downloads folder, I'm probably most interested in the thing I just downloaded, so having that near the top makes a lot of sense and would gladly prefer that than having it sorted alphabetically.
However, if I'm just looking at a directory of documents, alphabetical wins for sure. If I'm looking at a music collection, I'd probably want to sort by artist name alphabetically, but not necessarily filename.
It amazes me that Windows gets worse with every update. I'd rater use an updated Windows Vista than Win11, yuck!
Not because it is good, but because Microsoft can't keep up with the others when it comes to messing up file management.
iOS: you essentially don't have files, just internal storage for apps
Android: you have files, but they are making it really hard to access them
MacOS: actually not that bad, but they still try hard to hide the filesystem from you
Linux: it is a UNIX system, files are everything and you have free access, but the experience tends to be inconsistent because there is no standard toolkit
With Windows, you have full access to the filesystem (depending on your permissions of course), the UI has become inconsistent lately, but there is almost always a way to get to the common file picker, and the explorer shell is quite nice: you can open file, copy, move, drag and drop, etc... with relative consistency. These operations seem trivial but if you have used some bare bone Linux desktops, you will realize that they are not.
https://osxdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/mac-os-x-fin...
Browsing the full path of a file using columns is extremely useful (at least to me as a developer).
Yes there is. Only it's called “Details” view (if I understood what you meant correctly.)
Press the [Alt] key to make Explorer’s menu appear, then View, then Details. IIRC. HTH!
click on file, in the top menu bar. Instead of a drop down menu, a ribbon apears from the left. The word file is nowhere to be seen.
click on save, two columns appear, filling the entire screen. Left column: Onedrive, Sites, This PC, add a place, browse. Right column: a list of sharepoint locations, that i have visited recently, without any tree structure. I don't want to use any of the cloud solutions (onedrive, sites, any sharepoint), I want to store it locally.
click on This PC. The right column changes: file name, extension, new folder. But it doesn't tell me where I am on this PC, even though it shows me a couple subfolders. But it doesn't show my my current path. So I look back into the left column.
click on Browse. I get the old save menu, with a fully functioning explorer.