You can enable long names in Windows, essentially removing that restriction and giving you the power of all the sub folders up to something like 26'000 characters.

Open the Registry Editor.
Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem
Find the LongPathsEnabled DWORD value, double-click it, and set its value to 1
Restart your computer
Be free and happy

[–] NJSpradlin@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago

That sounds like something my organization would have restricted access to.

[–] bleistift2@sopuli.xyz 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

And I guess this isn’t the default for backwards compatibility with 1978’s tech?

[–] dan@upvote.au 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

A lot of apps still use legacy Windows APIs that don't understand very long paths. Those APIs have been deprecated for maybe 15 years or more, but developers are lazy. Microsoft can't add support for long paths to the old APIs because they use a fixed buffer size (which means that only a certain amount of memory space is available for the path, and increasing it would break the apps that rely on that). They can't totally remove the old APIs because every app that uses them would break.

[–] bleistift2@sopuli.xyz 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

They can’t totally remove the old APIs because every app that uses them would break.

For every other company I would buy that argument. But for one that forces customers to throw away millions of computers which can’t run Win 11… no.

[–] Eheran@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

People having to buy new hardware for new software is and has been normal forever.

People losing access to their software because the OS changes how it deals with something did happen, but that is not something anyone wants.

[–] bitjunkie@lemmy.world 0 points 1 week ago

Well son of a bitch, there was a workaround