You can say goodbye to these legacy File Explorer options on Windows 11
How the fuck is removing the drive letters going to work? That’s some crazy stupid shit.
My tech company relies heavily on custom drive letters. If this feature goes public, we will never move off of Windows 10. It would literally kill the business if we couldn’t see which drive we were accessing.
yep, same. we’ve been saying at the office for the last year or so that win11 is going to be a skip and it sure looks like it now.
I think most people have misunderstood these changes. Drive letters are not removed, but the option “Show drive letters” in folder options is removed. By default, that option is enabled, so the drive letters will be shown, now if you want to disable them you’ll have to go to the registry.
Just like “Hide protected OS files” is enabled by default, it will remain like that, if you want to show them, you’ll have to fiddle with the registry instead of just changing an option.
I cant remember where I saw it, but there was a long windows conference on youtube recently but they are planning a big windows revamp it might be part of that, This time its not just front end but a lot of backend stuff is changing. including trying to make Adminless users the default without losing any important functionally for the average user.
found it! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8T6ClX-y2AE
Edit: Also iirc Dev and Canary channels are currently now testing windows 12, they just haven’t officially switched the names over.
It doesn’t sound like they’re removing the displayed drive letters so much as removing the setting that lets you toggle them on or off.
Removing things like showing drive letters in explorer, but in another part of the announcement they’re introducing a new focus session widget? I…
Removing things like showing drive letters in explorer
what.
I’m going to have to finally bite the bullet and move to linux soon, am I? >.>
Linux doesn’t show drive letters either.
There are no drive letters in Linux because that concept is specific to Windows.
Because that arbitrary concept doesn’t exist in Linux.
(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
I have like 4 drives at minimum and knowing where I am at a glance is nice, is there no hope
Maybe Linux has an alternative way to show drives. Idk I haven’t tried Linux.
Linux has a very different file-structure, which is the way your files are organized on a system. It’s a bit weird at first, but once you get used to it makes a lot of sense. A second drive can often be found at /mnt/DRIVENAME or /media/DRIVENAME. But they show up in the file manager in a list anyhow.
That’s for mounting, yeah, but when it comes to interacting with the hardware, Linux itself uses letters for some types of devices. For example, serial-connected ones (e.g. SATA internal drives, USB external drives) are /dev/sdx (x being a letter from A-Z). I don’t know what happens when all letters are used up though, maybe someone can chime in there? NVMe uses numbers it seems - my boot drive is /dev/nvme0n1
There are other ways to access devices and partitions besides that though. I just had to put EndeavourOS on a flash drive and the Arch Wiki recommended doing this by targeting the drive via /dev/disk/by-id/, which lists connected drives by name, connectivity and serial number.
When all the letters are used up, it goes into doubles, i.e. /dev/sdaa, /dev/sdab, and then triples, I believe.
That’s totally true and somehow it didn’t think of it. I think that is the closest equivalent of the Windows naming scheme on storage devices.
But on the contrary: I believe on Windows the drive letters ( C:, D;, etc) ARE used for recognition (by the user) while the drive is already mounted. But you can also mount them without assigning a drive letter, making it somewhat different than how it’s handled in Linux. On Linux, the (average) user usually doesn’t see stuff like “/dev/sda” unless they specifically look for it. At most, they will see the name that are assigned to the drive and it’s mounting point.
Linux doesn’t show drive letters because it doesn’t use drive letters at all. Instead, everything is a file off of the root directory.
In Linux there is one filesystem and you mount your drives in a folder of your choosing within that filesystem. By default external drives mount in /mnt or /run or wherever your distro sets a default mount point.
Linux doesn’t have drive letters. They use an entirely different system, where everything is a file.
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It… doesn’t? Unless you mean line /dev/sda1, but that’s not really the same thing. On Linux you can theoretically mount any drive anywhere you want under the root, so you might have your music on /mnt/music, or /media/music/ or you could mount it at /home/<username>/music.
Mine is on a drive called Stuff I have mounted at /mnt/Stuff/, I also have a symlink in my home directory from /mnt/Stuff/music/ to /home/<username>/music, which seamlessly makes it appear that it’s there as well.
Really it’s far more convenient than arbitrary drive letters!
I’m thinking the same. Windows becomes worse all the time. The only thing that’s kept me are some games.
“Get rid of that useless local account feature, but slowly, make it difficult to use first.”
Show drive letter
The fuk
WIndows 11 UI is only bearable with StartAllBack. https://www.startallback.com/
Neagtive. Costs 5 dollars for 1 license, more for more licenses.My Windows10 start menu broke when they added news & interests to the taskbar - typing to find an app stopped working and I could never fix it.
Finally I installed open-shell menu which replaces my start menu and restores it back to a more classic start menu with the ability to find apps by typing.
I’m honestly getting tired of Windows and all of my productivity apps are available for linux these days so I don’t know why I’m still running it aside from convenience. Once it’s no longer convenient, off I go to another platform. If only Spez from Reddit would get that concept.
Photoshop was the last program that kept me on Windows. Photopea.com does 95% of what my old Photoshop 5.5 does for me.
I’m 99% ready to move over to a Linux distro for day to day home use, and 90% done for work.
All my users are already dualboot ready, they just dont know it yet.I suggest to make a list of program on Windows that are critical for you, and then make a list of programs on Linux (that are maintained) and install everything on a 2nd SSD. The cost is negligible and you can tinker as much as you want without breaking your Windows install in any way.
Lol yeah I’ve been avoiding paid software for a while - and I agree, Photopea is awesome, I’ve been switching over to that as well. I’ve purposely stuck with open source alternatives for years, including for my CAD and 3D modelling needs. And I’ve toyed with the live-DVD of LinuxMint a few months back and it’s a slick looking OS. Once windows pisses me off enough, I’ll go dual-boot and default to linux mint
i use StartAllBack and it is heavenly.
yeah, it was the only thing keeping me with windows 11 before moving to linux
Show drive letter
Every day, I feel happier that I use Windows 10
Every day I feel happier that I gave up on windows entirely.
Trust me, I’d give up on Windows too. If only Linux had better app compatibility; I need to depend on Microsoft Office a lot, and anticheats break games on Linux
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WTF? I don’t even use icons and always use list view. I still have Windows here on my desktop but, aside from gaming, linux does basically everything I want already and I have it on my laptop.
For me, Linux does gaming just fine, though I admit I never play AAA games and rarely anything released in the last few years, which probably helps (as well as helping my bank balance!)
The options will continue to be available through registry keys.
Getting tired of the endless reg edits necessary to enable basic functionality on Windows 11
I use Windows 10 at home and it’s not so bad, but using Windows 11 at work makes me understand why everyone hates it
I went the batshit crazy route and just set up an AD server for home.
Let’s me gain some knowledge for work and ensure that every PC I configure at home ‘just works’ and if I’ve got to make changes to get something to actually fucking work, I only have to do it once.
A few of my linux servers auth through it too, which is pretty convenient, honestly.
C:
:(
D:
Looks like Microsoft are taking EU concerns to heart and are inviting friendly competition from alternative file explorers for Windows.
/s
Even in Windows 10 I’ve thought multiple times about searching for a better explorer, but the default one was always just good enough, so I wouldn’t do it. When I have to switch to Windows 11, I might have to actually do it.
Lol, another reason to never look back regarding MS shit 😂. Hide system files no more 🤨 🤣!? Why don’t we just remove everything from being viewed and just say that you can only mod user files and that’s it 🤣. There is only User<UserName> and that’s it 🤣.
I stopped being windows many years ago except when I’ve to fix my mobile phone. In linux we don’t have drive letters I just name the partitions instead.
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