[arch-general] We have lost the desktop war. The reason? Windows 7.

Norbert Zeh nzeh at cs.dal.ca
Tue Oct 27 02:56:33 EDT 2009


On Mon, Oct 26, 2009 at 10:31:06PM +0000, dennisjperkins at comcast.net wrote:
> 
> > Well, I guess they try to 'integrate' again, all config in one place, 
> > but again only for their bubble. 
> 
> Isn't there already an OS with such a terrible, bloated and cryptical 
> all config in one place database called registry? 
> 
> And wasn't there a principle in Unix/Linux: "Everything is a file."? 

Indeed, this is one of the many appeals of Linux.  What scares me about
Windows is that I cannot fix anything that Microsoft didn't expect to go
wrong - so pretty much everything ;) - because I need some program that
understands whatever proprietary format they use.  In addition, looking
for a messed-up entry in the registry is like looking for a needle in a
haystack because it's huge, not really documented, and the entry keys
are cryptic.

In old-fashioned Linux, you have a few well-defined text files that
control the behaviour of an application.  If they're messed up, I can go
at them with a text editor, and their entries are usually
well-documented in a man-page.  This is a level of maintainability that
is hard to beat.

I see why desktop people want to have a centralized place to configure
everything: the average user is probably not up to editing many text
files and probably doesn't understand half of what's written in the
man-pages explaining their contents.  But then I think the way to go is
to have a two-tier architecture with well-documented text files for the
individual applications underneath and a unified GUI on top that
manipulates (the most common options in) them.

Cheers,
Norbert


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