I had one client who's explorer didn't load, we tried different file browsers, all that used explorer as backend failed to load, only double commander (forgot the exact name, it's a dual pan file browser like midnight commander) that worked. And we couldn't find any solution online, at the end he was stuck with it for over an year, as it was not possible to reinstall.

On Linux everything is mostly decoupled, so this is not working not going to break the other thing, and I can replace it with something else.

People forgets that you're not working with a black box, unlike Windows

Most explorer issues are really file system issues. It's touchy. chkdsk in offline repair mode usually fixes it. For the rest, clear the thumbnail cache.

The ways Windows breaks are different from the ways Linux breaks, but there are still ways to fix it. Most of the rest are solved with one or two commands, and it's usually the same two: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/use-the-system-fil...