It’s that time of the week again, I guess.
The year is 2026, and I’m still amazed when I find a new entry in my Start menu’s All apps list for an app I don’t remember installing. This time, it’s Microsoft again, and the product is OneDrive Photos, which appears to be yet another photo viewer and editor for Windows 11 that nobody asked to have installed automatically.
While searching for Microsoft Photos, a new app called “OneDrive Photos” showed up in my results out of nowhere. It appears to have arrived either via Windows Update or an update for the OneDrive sync client on Windows.
↫ Mayank Parmar at Windows Latest
Just don’t use Windows. You people paid me to use it and it was not a fun experience.
I saw your write-up about your Windows experience, and I would’ve very much advised against sticking with the Windows stock apps, esp. File Explorer. Virtually nobody who is tech savvy does that. As a friend of mine is keen on saying, ‘I don’t like Windows. I like what I can run on Windows.’
Of course, I understand that this is sort of the equivalent of telling someone ‘you were using the wrong distro’ when they have a bad experience with Linux, but it is what it is.
And what you use? Basic file manager is poor, but it does basic jobs. I`ve been trying with Total Commander, but well… For me it`s ugly, so for just browsing files I use default explorer with thumbs, etc.
I would use explorer for browsing pictures or videos, but most everything else (Especially actually managing files and not just opening an individual file) I used total commander. I configured it once years ago and have made sure to keep a copy of the settings file intact since then.
But, since I no longer use Windows and use Linux, I do use Krusader, but honestly Dolphin is good enough since they ironed out the split-pane feature.
Total Commander is the way to got, but its default settings are a bit weird indeed.
You can try my preconfigured version here (“TOTALCMD.BAT” to make it portable) :
https://github.com/Kochise/win_portable/blob/master/Manager/Total%20Commander/TOTALCMD.BAT
Don’t forget to first run “recompose.bat” at the root to stitch back some files together.