There is a difference between two operating systems having their own ways of doing things, and making something needlessly complicated.It's easy to think of Linux as "harder" than Windows, simply because you're familiar with Windows.If you were a blank slate, most things would be equally new and "hard" for you.
Sadly, when it comes to file management in most Linux distros, I think things are needlessly complicated no matter which way you look at it.Some of it is simply UNIX baggage, and the rest is a difference in philosophy, or perhaps just general apathy.Whatever the reason, working with files in Linux has never been a fun experience for me, and that's before I have to open the terminal.
Basic tasks can come with surprisingly obscure prerequisites The one-click solutions are few and far between Close If you're a Windows user, you probably think nothing of creating a blank text file in an empty folder.Just right-click on an empty space, choose "new text document" and you're done.In GNOME, using the Nautilus file manager, you don't have this feature, but have to create a template by saving an example of the file type you want to the template folder.
Then you can create it using a new document menu command.To be fair, other file managers, like Dolphin, do work more like Windows File Explorer.However, you never know what's going to require unintuitive hoops with a given distro until you try.
Templates are actually powerful and useful, but they also require prep and extra steps.Maybe this is a good example of "different but not actually harder," but why not simply have some basic common templates ready to go? File permissions can be an absolute nightmare Why does it have to be so specific? All modern operating systems, Windows included, use a file permission system.Any file or folder belongs to a specific user or group of users.
This determines who is allowed to read, write, or delete files, and it's an essential part of basic security and computer management.However, if you're a Windows user, there's a good chance you've never even encountered the file permission system.Unless you've tried to recover files from a different Windows installation, in which case you'll quickly have to learn to take ownership of files and folders on Windows.
For most people, most of the time, file permissions are invisible on Windows.On Linux, that's not the case at all.Permissions are highly granular.
So, for example, you might be able to look inside a folder, but not open or modify any files.You might be allowed to list the contents of a directory, but blocked from reading or opening any files inside it.Likewise, individual apps might have their own permission issues.
I ran into this when I bought a mini PC to use as my Plex server.My first idea was to use Linux, and store my content on USB drives.However, Plex is set up as its own user, so it turns out the only way to let it see and use the files on my USB drives was to go through an insane dance of permission changes.
After half a day staring at a terminal and reading guides, I gave up and used Rufus to modify a Windows 11 install that would run on this ancient mini PC.No doubt chuckling to himself, my colleague Dave McKay wrote a clear guide on how to use USB drives with Plex on Linux.Please give that a read, and then tell me if the hoops you need to jump through to make that work are at all reasonable.
A network folder can work in the file manager and become awkward inside another app A NASty situation We love our NAS devices at How-To Geek and more people are realizing that they're better off hosting files on a local device than in someone else's data centers.Which makes it a real pity that Linux still makes network shares a pain, when it's pretty much seamless on everything else.If you thought getting an app like Plex to see a USB drive's contents was hard, wait until you have to deal with network shares.
You'll want to "fstab" your own eyes out.In a blog post by KDE developer Nate Graham, he neatly outlines the problems with network shares in KDE specifically.Basically, when you use KDE's Dolphin browser to open a network share, it's all good.
It has its own protocol and doesn't go through the whole traditional route of mounting the network drive locally as you'd manually do through the terminal.Any KDE apps, or apps that use the same method as Dolphin to access the network share will be fine, but apps that rely on the traditional Linux mounting method to access a network share won't be able to open files, or save them to the network share.As he points out, mounting things the old-fashioned way requires root access, and for encrypted drives there's no way to store credentials in an encrypted form.
So it's also a security nightmare.The blog post outlines how the KDE project will use a large financial endowment to fund improvement of how KDE handles network shares, but for now, that's the state of things.Linux needs to meet us halfway There's nothing wrong with doing your own thing, but I use both Windows and macOS every day, and run into much less friction doing what I would consider semi-routine things compared to Linux.
Distros like Zorin and Mint have the "day-to-day desktop experience" close to nailed down, but with any distro, things can spiral out of control once you start managing files and folders on your PC.
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