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João Carrasqueira on His Experience Moving From Windows to GNU/Linux
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XDA ☛ Linux desktops feel better and faster than Windows, and I don't want to go back
Until a little over a year ago, I used Windows exclusively for all my life, and in 2025, I took a turn and started primarily using Linux on my laptop, whereas my main desktop is a Mac. It's become very apparent to me that the experience of being on Linux feels much better than Windows, to the point where I'd rather deal with some limitations or have a little more work every now and then.
Aside from not being interested in supporting some of the stupid decisions Microsoft has been making with Windows 11 and other products, the fact is, Linux desktops just feel faster across the board compared to Windows. If you're only a Windows user, you probably don't really notice it, but once you start putting things side by side, it starts to become more apparent that Linux feels faster.
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XDA ☛ File managers are where Linux still loses to Windows
Let me start by touching on the built-in tools for file management, which are what most people will use. Over on Windows, File Explorer has been just fine for a long time. It works, it does the job, and it's been getting some big improvements in recent years, like adding tab support, cloud integrations, support for various archive file types, and more.
However, File Explorer isn't particularly fast. Jumping from one folder to another takes a split second longer than it should, which is actually something you can bypass if you toggle fullscreen mode and then turn it back off. For some reason, the default behavior adds a short delay when transitioning between folders, but a bug in the program seems to disable that behavior, and you can feel how much faster it gets. File Explorer can also struggle to load folders with a lot of files sometimes.
File management on Linux is a little different because every distro is going to give you a different file manager. I can't pretend I'm familiar with all of them, but I have used a few, and at their core, they share a lot of the same principles. I mostly use Dolphin on KDE Plasma, and it has some of the same principles as File Explorer, including the sidebar for jumping to important locations, support for tabs, and other basic features. There isn't a proper integration with cloud storage services like Windows has, but it works fine.