I appreciate you recognizing the PPP to determine pricing. Definitely something that can convert me to buy a subscription. Here hoping the app is also accessible (for screen readers).
The official Microsoft version is Run, and it's not bad. One of it's biggest limitations is it's not customizable, so no plugins or community like Alfred.
> PowerToys Run is a quick launcher for power users that contains additional features without sacrificing performance. It is open source and modular for additional plugins.
So this is false: it does support plugins, I just never heard of any.
Fluent Search is honestly great. I don't actually use the core search functionality (never found a need for it), but the Vim/keyboardless mode is convenient and something I miss moving away from Windows.
Basically, that mode lets you press Ctrl-M (if my memory is right) and it will label clickable targets on the screen with two-letter codes (or more or less depending on how many clickable targets there are).
Then typing those two letters will simulate a mouse click at the target, which is convenient if you like going mouseless as Vim encourages. (It is also possible to simulate double-click and right-click although I didn't use those much.)
Underrated software and probably the thing I miss most about moving away from Windows.
macOS actually does better in this area of keyboardless software: you have https://www.homerow.app/ and https://shortcat.app/. Not sure about linux, but I would imagine that there's probably something that somebody's hacked together out there.
Not at the os level but you might want to check out vimium for chrome or Firefox if you haven't already. Does what you explained (and a lot more) for browsers
I'll add this to my list of essential Windows apps that should be built-in, right alongside PowerToys, Process Explorer, and Chocolatey. I wish there was a mainstream competitor that could force MS to make a decent OS again (I already use Linux, but most people don't and it sure doesn't seem to be in a strong enough position to put any pressure on MS)
Linux is in a terrible position right now, I think right now might be the worst time to use Linux in a while, especially with being somewhere around halfway between the long, long Xorg/Wayland transition. People are right to be skeptical of whether it's worth the effort, but I am excited to see some problems being tackled that never really had great solutions in the past. (Examples: Mixed fractional DPI, proper and fully baked HDR and color profiles, high and variable mixed refresh rate, standard IME protocols, a good modern accessibility protocol in planning, possibly quite good open source NVIDIA RTX 20xx+ drivers soon?!)
I'm not sure if Linux will ever be pressure to MS for desktop Windows, though. Valve seems to be the most likely party to make it happen, but much like previous cases they're really carving out a new space for Linux to potentially hold a strong position in, not really competing on MS's home turf of desktop and laptop computers. Though, it is promising that Valve has built their commercial products on a fairly standard desktop stack, as it does seem to be leading to ecosystem-wide improvements that will still improve the situation for people who are willing to make concessions to use alternative operating systems.
- every game I want to play, from multiplayer shooters, over single player games, super old games, racing games, simulator games, etc. works. Some required going to protondb and reading there, applying the fixes.
- programming/work obviously is possible when it wasnt on windows (much better dev experience)
- I have a live boot arch iso USB because every few months, an update bricks my install. No idea why, but it does. I do read the update mails. The fix is usually to boot into the USB, mount my drives, chroot, mkinitcpio, and reboot. I suspect it's an issue with some driver or firmware.
- I use Xorg KDE Plasma, works very well. No visual issues. You dont have to switch to wayland ;)
For what its worth I think Linux can work great, and obviously you definitely do not need to switch to Wayland. However, what I really mean to say is, it's in a rough position for anyone looking to switch. While you may say "ah, just use X11" and I'd even totally agree, the problem is that many users genuinely need things that only Wayland does well, like again, for laptops mixed DPI is a damn-near must-have and it just isn't a very good experience on X no matter what you do.
Also, what distro to recommend? Honestly, I find Arch to be one of the best mixes of stable and reliable, which is odd. Somehow I find Pop!_OS and Ubuntu installs with fucked up dpkg issues that I can't even figure out, and sometimes I wind up just manually grabbing packages with apt download and forcing things into a correct state. I'd expect Arch with an inexperienced user to be worse, but multiple datapoints strongly disagree so far; the biggest issue with Arch has just been installs. If Arch were friendlier to install and had smoother updates, it would be hands-down the way to go for noobs. Archinstall is certainly a step forward from browsing the wiki on lynx, so there is that.
Feels, though, like there should be some immutable "just works" distro, that gives users a good mix of things. Like... give users an immutable base with image based deployment. Flatpak apps. Maybe ChromeOS crostini-style chroots to use a "traditional" distro? SteamOS is somewhere close here.
I like Linux, and I use only Linux on my own hardware aside from VMs (and practically only NixOS at that) but is it in a position to seriously eat at Windows? I think not in the desktop and laptop market. Hopefully some day, though.
Absolutely agree with you on all points, and I think Arch is often falsely thought of as unstable. Its rolling, but of course the software is vetted and stable.
I have had other distros break in more ways and more destructively than arch, for sure
I'm really curious about why this is. I have a desktop I update daily, a laptop I update very irregularly (once even went without an update for over a year), and a toy server that I update once a year or so (I know, terrible security practice). All running arch. And I think I've had two situations where something broke significantly after an update, and even those didn't require a live boot USB.
What desktop environment/window manager/compositor do you use? I'd guess one of those is the culprit if anything
I also have the arch live USB for the same reason. For me the issue was that /tmp was full and after and update that included the kernel I didn't read the logs of mkinitcpio that told me of the failure of the rebuild.
How is searching for documents? Can it search within files? I have used Listary, PowerRun, and Fluent Search but they don't find all the files, especially if the files reside in Google Drive. (Listary used to be pretty good before the update.)
I've tried several launchers in the past decades, across operating systems. On Windows I'm a happy Keypirinha user — it's fast, uses a twentieth of the memory needed by its C# relatives (Run, Flow, etc.), and results appear with almost no latency as I type.
Plenty of plug-ins (list here https://ue.spdns.de/packagecontrol/ ) and they are fairly easy to develop: a Python code that returns a catalog of results, statically or dynamically.
Maybe it is my PC, but, in my experience, Fluent Search is half-baked. And I really wanted to love it; still have it installed.
Screen search is inconsistent (the letter assignment for the same item on the screen changes between invocations). Certain items are not reachable in, e.g., VSCode. The last time I checked, screen search had no support for multiple monitors. Searching within files was in the beta build, which was, well, very beta. Fluent Search indexing is pretty resource heavy.
If you have had similar issues and resolved them, I would love to hear from you.
The "Features" page is the worst performing web page I have seen in a long time. Loading 14+ MB worth of images, spending over 11 seconds on loading fonts, loading the same script multiple times. All that for just a static web page with some video embeds and a comment section is quite astounding to be honest. Makes me not want to check out their product.
I wanted that toolbar for a very long time, didn't know it now exists. Thanks for recommending. I have switched to https://github.com/dremin/RetroBar/ for a very a while now but this is very intriguing.
42 comments
[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 97.7 ms ] threadThat must be a pretty huge opportunity. I don't use Windows, so not for me, but why no one has built something like it?
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/run.
So this is false: it does support plugins, I just never heard of any.
Basically, that mode lets you press Ctrl-M (if my memory is right) and it will label clickable targets on the screen with two-letter codes (or more or less depending on how many clickable targets there are).
Then typing those two letters will simulate a mouse click at the target, which is convenient if you like going mouseless as Vim encourages. (It is also possible to simulate double-click and right-click although I didn't use those much.)
Underrated software and probably the thing I miss most about moving away from Windows.
I'm not sure if Linux will ever be pressure to MS for desktop Windows, though. Valve seems to be the most likely party to make it happen, but much like previous cases they're really carving out a new space for Linux to potentially hold a strong position in, not really competing on MS's home turf of desktop and laptop computers. Though, it is promising that Valve has built their commercial products on a fairly standard desktop stack, as it does seem to be leading to ecosystem-wide improvements that will still improve the situation for people who are willing to make concessions to use alternative operating systems.
Intel CPU, RTX 2070, 1440p@160Hz screen (with HDR, which doesnt work). ArchLinux.
What works:
- every game I want to play, from multiplayer shooters, over single player games, super old games, racing games, simulator games, etc. works. Some required going to protondb and reading there, applying the fixes.
- programming/work obviously is possible when it wasnt on windows (much better dev experience)
- I have a live boot arch iso USB because every few months, an update bricks my install. No idea why, but it does. I do read the update mails. The fix is usually to boot into the USB, mount my drives, chroot, mkinitcpio, and reboot. I suspect it's an issue with some driver or firmware.
- I use Xorg KDE Plasma, works very well. No visual issues. You dont have to switch to wayland ;)
Also, what distro to recommend? Honestly, I find Arch to be one of the best mixes of stable and reliable, which is odd. Somehow I find Pop!_OS and Ubuntu installs with fucked up dpkg issues that I can't even figure out, and sometimes I wind up just manually grabbing packages with apt download and forcing things into a correct state. I'd expect Arch with an inexperienced user to be worse, but multiple datapoints strongly disagree so far; the biggest issue with Arch has just been installs. If Arch were friendlier to install and had smoother updates, it would be hands-down the way to go for noobs. Archinstall is certainly a step forward from browsing the wiki on lynx, so there is that.
Feels, though, like there should be some immutable "just works" distro, that gives users a good mix of things. Like... give users an immutable base with image based deployment. Flatpak apps. Maybe ChromeOS crostini-style chroots to use a "traditional" distro? SteamOS is somewhere close here.
I like Linux, and I use only Linux on my own hardware aside from VMs (and practically only NixOS at that) but is it in a position to seriously eat at Windows? I think not in the desktop and laptop market. Hopefully some day, though.
I have had other distros break in more ways and more destructively than arch, for sure
I'm really curious about why this is. I have a desktop I update daily, a laptop I update very irregularly (once even went without an update for over a year), and a toy server that I update once a year or so (I know, terrible security practice). All running arch. And I think I've had two situations where something broke significantly after an update, and even those didn't require a live boot USB.
What desktop environment/window manager/compositor do you use? I'd guess one of those is the culprit if anything
there is no update for a long time but this one works perfectly for me
Plenty of plug-ins (list here https://ue.spdns.de/packagecontrol/ ) and they are fairly easy to develop: a Python code that returns a catalog of results, statically or dynamically.
Screen search is inconsistent (the letter assignment for the same item on the screen changes between invocations). Certain items are not reachable in, e.g., VSCode. The last time I checked, screen search had no support for multiple monitors. Searching within files was in the beta build, which was, well, very beta. Fluent Search indexing is pretty resource heavy.
If you have had similar issues and resolved them, I would love to hear from you.
Reality : install it, tried to search Firefox tabs, doesn't work. Then found https://github.com/adirh3/Fluent-Search/issues/850
Nope.
PowerToys Run has search built in and can search pretty much everything in windows including files, folders, windows, the registry, settings and more.
[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/run
[0] https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/issues/11873#issuecom...
https://www.flowlauncher.com/
Using `content:<your string>` in its searchbar you can also search content of files.
https://github.com/srwi/EverythingToolbar