The slow consistent degeneration of file explorer, the primary core service for users in the entire OS, is truly a sign of the times at Msoft.
This shit crashes all the time in our office workflow, hard restarting explorer process. USB issues, soft freezing on certain types of file transfer.
Mapping drives and credentials integration have been bugged as fuck for at least 3 years. I shouldn’t have to edit every connection in our office in credential manager to fix this.
And anything happening with the explorer process is infuriating to try and diagnose. It almost never throws an error code or event code when it fucks up. So good luck trying to fix it yourself.
What happened to alternate shells? It's still possible to change the environment launch app in environmental variables, but I haven't seen a different start menu or shell since around Win7 days.
If this was possible, along with an update system that doesn't bring down even the "server" version of the OS, it would be essentially production ready.
Microsoft has no idea how screwed they are long term yet. Demand for alternative cloud and OS providers keeps rising and rising but I bet they think nothing will come of it.
The fact they're resorting to hacks like this to resolve problems is just pathetic. I say pathetic because MS is a trillion-dollar company -- they have absolutely no excuse whatsoever for not knuckling down and fixing these problems permanently. All preloading it does is kick the can down the road. Then again, this is Ms we're talking about, so I'm not at all surprised they would do something like this. I wonder if anyone there even knows how explorer even works anymore.
After booting up the Linux kernel my current PC (Broadwell-E i7, Geforce 1080, built in 2016!) will launch into Hyprland with all necessary services running, Zen with about 20-30 open tabs and VSCodium with last nights hacking project still open and ready to go in less than 30 milliseconds or so.
That's when I personally discovered modern Windows is more or less fundamentally broken, and probably already was when Windows 10 was released (11 is still basically 10, by the way, look at the build number).
Also, it's amazing to discover how ridiculously fast "old" hardware still is in 2025 just by installing a non-Windows OS.
What the hell is even going on at Microsoft these days? I'm genuinely surprised they don't have enough collective brainpower left to realize how bad this situation is.
They just don't care. Fixing bugs does not generate revenue. The customers are all captured in the Microsoft echosystem so that any migration will hurt.
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[ 130 ms ] story [ 239 ms ] threadThis shit crashes all the time in our office workflow, hard restarting explorer process. USB issues, soft freezing on certain types of file transfer.
Mapping drives and credentials integration have been bugged as fuck for at least 3 years. I shouldn’t have to edit every connection in our office in credential manager to fix this.
And anything happening with the explorer process is infuriating to try and diagnose. It almost never throws an error code or event code when it fucks up. So good luck trying to fix it yourself.
If this was possible, along with an update system that doesn't bring down even the "server" version of the OS, it would be essentially production ready.
[0] https://filepilot.tech/
That's when I personally discovered modern Windows is more or less fundamentally broken, and probably already was when Windows 10 was released (11 is still basically 10, by the way, look at the build number).
Also, it's amazing to discover how ridiculously fast "old" hardware still is in 2025 just by installing a non-Windows OS.
Only File Explorer ? They shall preload everything in Win 11. /s
https://www.elevenforum.com/t/restore-classic-file-explorer-...