this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2026
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This one feature alone is why Linux is better than Windows (hexbear.net)
submitted 5 days ago by tombruzzo@hexbear.net to c/technology@hexbear.net
31 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

No more zip files gunking up your downloads folder. Just extract and delete all at once

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[–] came_apart_at_Kmart@hexbear.net 23 points 5 days ago (2 children)

haha true. there are so many QoL things going on, it's hard to keep track. extract & trash in the context menu is tight.

i like ability to pick any window and in two clicks enable/disable it from always staying on top of other windows.

also, the VPN controls built into the network adapter on the task bar. two clicks to toggle and it's nearly instant. any change to windows networking seems to require it to do some complex 9-dimensional calculation of a trip to mars.

something i really appreciate is being able to build back the Quick Launch bar as a widget, which Windows destroyed in Win11 and made it impossible to recreate without 3rd party garbage. it was legitimately one of the few things i appreciated about the windows interface... i think it started before windows 7? but each iteration they would get hide it in favor of their duplo-for-grandma bs, until they completely vaporized it Win11 so we would be forced into the jankiest iteration of the toolbar ever devised.

[–] tombruzzo@hexbear.net 12 points 5 days ago

It feels like the difference between software made by computer users vs corporations. The improvements actually improve the experience

[–] JohnBrownsBawdy@hexbear.net 3 points 5 days ago (2 children)

What distro do you use? This sounds really cool 😃 I got a framework laptop off cl and am looking for distro reccs

[–] alexandra_kollontai@hexbear.net 4 points 4 days ago

Any distro is fine as long as it has KDE.

[–] came_apart_at_Kmart@hexbear.net 3 points 4 days ago

currently i run Bazzite (the KDE build) as a recreational daily driver due its built in windows gaming compatibility and built in steam gaming.

i have a laptop dedicated more for like productivity and that runs Kubuntu, and a tiny form factor seedbox/servarr/media appliance with a 24TB DAS that runs Ubuntu long term stable, which i manage almost exclusively through ssh at this point. it sits in a little closet and quietly self-hosts all my media.

im mostly used to the ubuntu distro and bazzite is the sort of gaming/experimental test box. its pretty great.l and tons of stuff works right out of the box.

[–] cristian64@reddthat.com 13 points 5 days ago (2 children)

To me it's the fact that, if the archive contains a single file or folder, it doesn't create an extra parent directory. So annoying when on Windows you end up with a folder inside a folder (or a bunch of files all over the place).

[–] invalidusernamelol@hexbear.net 3 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Windows needs this the most because the amount of times I've tried to extract an archive just to have it fail because people kept re-zipping the folder into a folder with the same name is infuriating.

They always use the directoryname to include info about the files too so it's some 65 character abomination with a file of the same name inside that breaks the 160 character path limit on Windows lol.

I always just end up using Python or WSL to pull the file out and put it somewhere reasonable.

[–] ashinadash@hexbear.net 5 points 5 days ago

Most archivers give you the option for a subdirectory instead :)

ⓘ Remember to enable JPEG-XL support in your browser, even on your phone!

[–] git@hexbear.net 8 points 4 days ago (1 children)

This isn’t really a Linux specific feature. You can run Dolphin on Windows (or elsewhere) with the Ark extract and delete service if you really want to, or use a Windows (un)archiver with this feature built in as a shell extension e.g. WinRAR or scripting it with 7zip. Keka also does this on macOS.

[–] tombruzzo@hexbear.net 2 points 4 days ago

I tried Dolphin on Windows and had a bunch of issues. I know it' possible but Windows refusing to acknowledge any other file browser is a big part of the problem.

I think it's a cool idea as a Linux "free trial" though. Your file browser is probably one of the few OS specific programs people use. Being able to expand folders without going into them is really useful

[–] Enjoyer_of_Games@hexbear.net 8 points 5 days ago

KDE gang

ⓘ

[–] SorosFootSoldier@hexbear.net 7 points 5 days ago

That's really handy.

[–] RaspberryTuba@hexbear.net 5 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (2 children)

Started dogfooding the latest Outlook as we switched to being an M365 shop instead of having old school generic IMAP accounts, and it’s what half our clients and their customers use.

Because it’s a web app in a wrapper it does “save all attachments” by zipping them. 🙃 Great when many of my regular tasks involve getting a pile of images to process and use somewhere.

[–] invalidusernamelol@hexbear.net 2 points 3 days ago

Just write a lil Python script that uses ZipFile. Still a PITA.

[–] tombruzzo@hexbear.net 4 points 4 days ago

Oh yeah, new outlook sucks less than classic outlook but it still sucks. I just use it in the browser because I use multiple desktops and you can set it to use gmail keyboard shortcuts, which the app doesn't let you do.

[–] ashinadash@hexbear.net 5 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

Counterpoint: I uninstalled Ark because it sucks eggs and now there's no right-click item for extract & delete. Checkmate liberal........

ⓘ Remember to enable JPEG-XL support in your browser, even on your phone!

[–] Acute_Engles@hexbear.net 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I uninstalled Ark because it sucks eggs

I have been rocking a steamdeck as my daily driver for a bit now. What about ark sucks and is it anything that the average user would worry about?

[–] ashinadash@hexbear.net 4 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I have autism & Ark doesn't support click and drag extracts, which is true of most Arch archivers but also when you try to open a big .zip or .7z archive on a network drive, it tries to extract all 12 gigabytes or whatever to your temp directory. Also its UI is middling and it's slower to extract than Engrampa for e.g.

ⓘ Remember to enable JPEG-XL support in your browser, even on your phone!

[–] Acute_Engles@hexbear.net 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

it tries to extract all 12 gigabytes or whatever to your temp directory

yuck ill keep that in mind ty

[–] insurgentrat@hexbear.net 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

When playing with large files using a terminal emulator and CLI software is usually better. The tools are often much more fully featured and faster, extracting specific files from archives and so on is very easy via the command line.

[–] ashinadash@hexbear.net 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I hate having to cd places and type in longass filenames full of underscores tho :/

ⓘ Remember to enable JPEG-XL support in your browser, even on your phone!

[–] insurgentrat@hexbear.net 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Tab completion? Don't name files like that? Use scripts to rename them? use a qmk keyboard or low level script to make typing underscores easier?

[–] ashinadash@hexbear.net 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

use scripts to rename them

And I'm supposed to run a script to rename every zip I download? I do have qmk compatible keyboards but I'm not really seeing the use case here. It just seems like for file managers, clicking on icons is easier? Less keystrokes at the least.

ⓘ Remember to enable JPEG-XL support in your browser, even on your phone!

[–] insurgentrat@hexbear.net 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I have everything named consistently on my computer and part of that is a program watching my downloads/sort directory and renaming everything that lands in it by removing capitals and replacing spaces or underscores with hyphens.

Mostly I just use tab completion/regex/patterns, qmk can be used to e.g. replace space with underscore when you switch layers and switch back after like 0.5 seconds without typing. Makes it fast to write underscores for programming etc.

I find taking my hands off my keyboard and having to switch programs from terminal slows me down massively, and most serious computer users (e.g. job is professionally use a computer) in the linux space I have met feel the same which is why I trained myself to use consoles well.

If you're slow and not interested in getting more practiced use whatever, the software for guis are just factually less featureful/composable and much less performant is all.

[–] ashinadash@hexbear.net 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

emilie-pain Y'know I think I just don't get it. Is it because I wasn't raised on either Commodore BASIC or a handmedown 286 shitbox? Where did I go wrong? Like

I have everything named consistently on my computer and part of that is a program watching my downloads/sort directory and renaming everything that lands in it by removing capitals and replacing spaces or underscores with hyphens.

Wow that sounds kinda rad, I sure wish I knew how to just write a script or conjure a program or whatever.

tab completion

Dunno what "regex/patterns" is here or how to use qmk for any of that, but I know about completion, in fish it shows what it'll autocomplete if you press Right Cursor Key which is neat.

most serious computer users (e.g. job is professionally use a computer)

Oh you are so barking up the wrong tree, I'm just some idiot who hates windows enough to have switched. I like the terminal and think it's chill for a lot of things, but the poor state of graphical archivers on linux does bite. Maybe if I were gigabrained and lived nearer to silicon valley I'd have learned to use terminal for everything correctly and become much cooler at computers.

ⓘ Remember to enable JPEG-XL support in your browser, even on your phone!

[–] insurgentrat@hexbear.net 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Wow that sounds kinda rad, I sure wish I knew how to just write a script or conjure a program or whatever.

The cool thing is that you can learn! Python is approachable and shell is an extremely simple language so you could pick either. It's more straight-forward to use shell as you can use all the lovely existing programs by just writing their name, no need to manage libraries/call out to stuff.

sed 's/_/-/ text_with_underscores will replace underscores with hyphens for example in the text. so one part of a script renaming everything would be

`for filename in *

do

NEWNAME=sed '/_/-/ $filename

mv $filename $NEWNAME

done`

off the top of the dome so maybe a mistake in it.

Dunno what "regex/patterns" is here or how to use qmk for any of that, but I know about completion, in fish it shows what it'll autocomplete if you press Right Cursor Key which is neat.

expansion patterns are stuff like the asterisk above, it matches any character any number of times. So e.g. prefix_* matches all strings that start with prefix_. Regex is a language for describing strings and performing operations on them, you can do stuff like ask for "the string that has 3 letters, none of which are Z, followed by a number between 2 and 8 at least once, then anything. Output a string made of the number, then the rest of the string"

Very powerful for finding and manipulating text, and since all linux software takes text as arguments and outputs text extremely useful for sophisticated software chains (when you compose things with pipes in console to get complex behaviour from simple software).

[–] ashinadash@hexbear.net 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The cool thing is that you can learn! Python is approachable and shell is an extremely simple language

There is always this learn-to-code but never any specificity.

`for filename in *

do

NEWNAME=sed '/_/-/ $filename

mv $filename $NEWNAME

done`

Hexbear's formatting sucks for copypasting code, that's like pretty simple though I guess.

like the asterisk above, it matches any character any number of times.

Ah my beloved LOAD "*",8,1, that's a classic, I see. Much ado about computer programs...

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[–] insurgentrat@hexbear.net 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

If you do want your computer to be more comfortable then rather than the nebulous "learn to code" learning to script (simple programs that run from top to bottom) to automate annoying or repetitive tasks is a really good way.

I am biased, I started as a system administrator and learned to program that way (now I'm an ok programmer, slow but I try and make very robust programs that are performant).

On my computer I have a /home/rat/bin/ folder on my PATH variable (that determines how console evaluated "programname command" type entries, it looks on the PATH for programname and invokes it) that I fill with little half baked helpers for myself.

Just yesterday I decided I needed something to remind me to stretch, so I added a little piece of code (literally just "notify-send 'Take a stretch break'") and added a systemd timer unit to call it 20 minutes after boot and twenty minutes after that. There's lots of ways I could improve it (pause when inactivity, overrule DnD, add pausing functions, add a systray applet thing) but no need to start with all that and no need to dive right in to some bloated piece of crap bundling electron for something that just increases how much I stretch.

You'll probably have stuff you do often: clearing out old downloads, searching for files in a particular directory, opening a set of programs together, switching between night and say brightness and volume, renaming stuff, setting up folder structures and so on. If you find yourself repeating something you can ask "Is there a way to just have this happen automatically?"

Linux's POSIX (mostly) compliance makes it really easy because you can just start by going "I guess I'll chain my most common commands together" and worry about adding arguments/error recovery/logs etc if it's ever relevant.

[–] ashinadash@hexbear.net 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I started as a system administrator and learned to program that way

michael-laugh How 2 become a sysadmin

I've done 'rename every file in x folder manually' and I didn't know how scripting, but I knew it would be cool to have. Thanks for chatting in response to my frankly silly bullshit though.

ⓘ Remember to enable JPEG-XL support in your browser, even on your phone!

[–] SocialistVibes01@lemmy.ml 4 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Nah I'm still sticking to Xfce

[–] tombruzzo@hexbear.net 3 points 4 days ago

Xfce is like downloading extra RAM compared to Plasma so i totally get that