When U moved to Czechia in 2014, I was amazed to find everyone used this app. In my 2nd job, the company had a site licence and it was preinstalled on all PCs.

I'd not used or seen a 2-pane file manager since about 1993 and I never missed them.

It's ubiquitous in central Europe and most people sneer at OS file managers. I was amazed and baffled.

I am perfectly capable of using them and occasionally did in the late 1980s, but I don't normally use them and have no need. My Czech friends and colleagues are as amazed and baffled as I am by them.

I easily do this stuff in the Windows Explorer or Mac Finder, but mostly I work on Linux in Nemo. I can do all this stuff and sometimes I have shown people how and they are amazed that I can do stuff that they think impossible.

My overall conclusion is that a lot of FOSS development is driven by people who don't know how to properly use the tools that the OS came with.

I keep hearing about "editing at the speed of thought" in Vim and so on. Users have to learn the keystrokes because that's the primary UI. Result, when you know it, it's fast.

Well, newsflash. Windows 3 had keystrokes for everything and by Win95 it was very customisable and extensible as well. If you learn to use the keyboard, the entire OS and all apps work as fast as Vim.

When I see the many Windows-like desktops for Linux that can't do a vertical taskbar properly (MATE, LXQt, Cinnamon, Enlightenment) then I know they were cloned from Windows by someone who didn't know how to use Windows.

When I see a hamburger menu on a computer with a keyboard, I know that that developer didn't know how to use a GUI properly.

When I see CSD window decorations, I know that that developer didn't know how to use a windowing GUI properly.

Total commander isn’t FOSS.

Ironically windows 11 can’t do vertical taskbars.

And where in windows can you change the system shortcuts?

I'm aware of that. There are lots of FOSS equivalents, though. Including, I believe, on Windows. Wikipedia lists 23 of which I think -- haven't checked -- the majority are FOSS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_manager#Orthodox_file_man...

> Ironically windows 11 can’t do vertical taskbars.

True. Easily fixed with Explorer Patcher, though. Which, ironically, is FOSS.

> And where in windows can you change the system shortcuts?

I don't use it much any more and stopped early this century, so my knowledge here may be out of date.

When I do, I use SharpKeys to put a GUI on editing the relevant registry keys for keyboard remapping.

https://github.com/randyrants/sharpkeys

In the NT 3.x era, it was the properties of every EXE's PIF file. So I set Crtl+Alt+(initial) to open my most used apps. Ctrl+Alt+D for DOS, E for Excel, W for Word, etc.

This still works with limitations under Win9x through to XP, which is when I jumped off the Windows ship.

But mostly it's about learning the many many built-ins.