Windows Explorer crashes for me about ~3 times a day at work, and takes down the taskbar with it, so not sure about more stable. I don't use Nautilus though because it's pretty bare bones compared to Dolphin. Also:
> These super-indexed desktop linux search functions are also dog slow
Baloo-indexed KRunner on Plasma is instant. I index my entire home folder, including hidden files, and I can substring search with imperceptible latency. I can't speak to other search implementations, but yes KRunner + Baloo is much faster than grep.
I'm pretty sure you have a plugin installed for Explorer that makes it crash - while Explorer is far from a perfect piece of software, its not even close to this bad, but it's pretty easy to extend it with COM objects that then run inside the process, that can and do crash the whole thing.
It's a work computer, and from what I see there's no visible plugins. But corporate IT always does some fuck shit (that's a technical term), so I wouldn't be surprised.
I recommend you install
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/pro...
And take a look what DLLs have been loaded into your explorer.exe. Look for non Microsoft-signed ones.