> There is no class in college on how to triage your email inbox, manage your agenda, or organize your computer files.
Small nitpick, having to organize your computer files is mostly a consequence of Windows having a terrible and ineffective search. I recently realized that I don't really need to organize stuff in folders on Linux since I use meaningful names when I store files, and search when I retrieve them. On Windows, the search is unusable, and thus I spend a lot of time making a hierarchy of categories with folders, which is a waste of time. To use the kitchen analogy, the first time you use a good search is like the first time you use a good knife. It changes the way you approach things. I eat way more vegetables since now cutting them isn't a pain.
How is search better on Linux? KDE's Baloo is worse than Windows Search; it's an unending trainwreck of failing to index files (whether names or contents) on some computers and going stale on other computers. Maybe GNOME's file indexing is better, I'm not sure. Do you use the (non-index-based) find and grep CLI commands? In that case you can install them on Windows too, or install fd/rg on both Windows and Linux.
> How is search better on Linux? KDE's Baloo is worse than Windows Search; it's an unending trainwreck of failing to index files (whether names or contents) on some computers and going stale on other computers. Maybe GNOME's file indexing is better, I'm not sure.
I use Gnome and it works well. I'd say it's how I expect a search to work, at least.
I think search could be even better with ways to index other informations. For example, search into the metadata of audio files. My dream is to have something as good as Google in its prime, but for my own files. I'm still thinking on how to reduce the need for the user to produce metadata. For now, the "best" we can usually do is try to give files descriptive names and then search for it, which is good but still very limited to how the web works for example.
> Do you use the (non-index-based) find and grep CLI commands? In that case you can install them on Windows too, or install fd/rg on both Windows and Linux.
There are also tools to replace the search on Windows, but most people will never install those. My comment was more general, about how lots of people have been trained to not rely on search because the basic search in their files is broken. Maybe a consequence of this is that people have a resistance to search, which would explain why so many of them have trouble using a search engine by themselves. It's also a waste of human time, an enormous one.
I think you just hit the nail on the head why I spend so much time storing and organising in onenote, I always thought it was because onenote search is good, it's not, it's because the system search is so poor.
Windows’ built-in file search becomes embarrassing once you’ve used Everything. Though Windows search does save me from having to trawl through settings/control panel.
Small nitpick, having to organize your computer files is mostly a consequence of Windows having a terrible and ineffective search. I recently realized that I don't really need to organize stuff in folders on Linux since I use meaningful names when I store files, and search when I retrieve them. On Windows, the search is unusable, and thus I spend a lot of time making a hierarchy of categories with folders, which is a waste of time. To use the kitchen analogy, the first time you use a good search is like the first time you use a good knife. It changes the way you approach things. I eat way more vegetables since now cutting them isn't a pain.