• Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
    0·
    10 months ago

    Adding websearch to the start bar’s search was solving a problem that didn’t exist. If I want to search the web, I can use a web browser to do it. I feel like it was added to try to make up for how bad the search used to be (and still is? I just never really had a habit of using it because it was so unreliable and depended on other ways to figure out where things were), so that it would give something, plus MS really wanted bing to be a thing.

    I recently switched to KDE and their main search bar also includes web search. I haven’t looked at the settings for it and expect there’s probably a way to disable that, but I didn’t feel great about seeing that there.

    • Wispy2891@lemmy.world
      11·
      10 months ago

      Problem that powertoys are becoming bloated too. Before switching my 8gb RAM laptop to Linux, it was constantly swapping memory. I investigated and it was powertoys slowly eating everything. The two almost identical launchers, 300mb each. The eyedropper that you gonna use once a month 200mb, the help that comes out when you long press the windows key, another 80mb. Same for the screen ruler. Then the accent helper, and so on. My 8gb laptop only had 1 GB free Memory After a clean boot

  • ∃∀λ@programming.dev
    0·
    10 months ago

    KDE’s Plasma Desktop has a web search plugin that I use all the time. Typing the Win (Super) key followed by wp:Sistine Chapel and then the Enter key brings me straight to the Wikipedia entry on the Sistine Chapel. imdb:Jurassic Park brings me to the IMDb page for Jurassic Park. yt: will search YouTube, and so on. There are around 200 keywords pre-programmed into it, including for searching programming language documentation. Unlike the Windows feature displayed here, it doesn’t use the network unless you specify a prefix and it accesses only the service you specify by the keyword. Whoever added this feature had to do so very little work compared to the payoff. It just takes the part after the colon and inserts it into a search URL for the corresponding service and opens that URL in the browser. It’s very convenient. None of this web search stuff comes up when you’re just searching for apps and there are no surprises.

  • smeg@infosec.pubEnglish
    0·
    10 months ago

    I keep a small Win11 partition on my 2022 gaming laptop in case I need to take a cert exam or use a gov website, and I booted it for updating for the first time in 6 months. It took over 6 hours and 6 reboots to update! At one point, it was going bu-ding every minute from random notifications so I had to mute it.

    Meanwhile, my 2012 Thinkpad T420 needed a full Fedora version upgrade, and that finished in 15 minutes.

    No wonder MS is losing users