That thing that looks like an old floppy disk is a save button?
I’m surprised that you didn’t realise it is a save button, when you know what a floppy disk is. It’s a very common usage. If you didn’t know what a floppy disk is, then I’d understand why you don’t know what the button does.
I’m not sure what the problem is with clearing the trash on Windows. It seems pretty self explanatory to me. See video:
Once again, I'm just commenting on the lack of feedback. I pressed the button to empty the trash, and it appears that nothing happens. It just took a long time to empty 20,000 items out of the trash. A little status message couldn't hurt. The same with the save button. I'm waiting 14 hours for the sync to finish from the PC before I can sync mobile.
Ok. Any reason why you have so many items in the recycle bin? Feedback issues aside, there is a disclaimer on the sync wizard of the desktop app, that sync targets other than the recommended ones may be slow (due to throttling by the provider). If you have a very large number of sync items, you unfortunately should expect slowness for any large bulk operation, unless you use a faster sync target than Dropbox (which in most cases require you to pay money for the service or self hosting costs)
the reason the trash is so full is several failed import attempts i was told to do in this forum after the first one failed to bring in attachments. in most apps - you put stuff in the trash and it goes away in 30 days - not joplin for some reason. i have been waiting for my trash can to empty for 48 hours now with 31920 completed so far - i have no idea why sync has to include the trash can, nor why the app simply does not auto delete trash or send it to a background task but here i am waiting for the app to finish with the trash before i can even get my mobile app synced after the reinstall. i don’t think these are unreasonable expectations. i never said i thought the operation was slow - i said it should have some visual feedback so we know what to expect. gmail tells you it is deleting trash - 3000 of 40000 and so forth - so you can plan. i will let you know IF it finishes. right now i have no mobile app at all.