Comments by "Lawrence D’Oliveiro" (@lawrencedoliveiro9104) on "Legacy Linux Apps Are A Dotfile Nightmare" video.

  1. SSH is one of the major ones that is so widespread, you can give them a pass.
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  2. Windows is an absolute mess. This is why you need special tools to migrate app installations from one system to another. On Linux, you don’t.
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  3. I don’t believe that story about it being an inadvertent bug for a moment. The programmers concerned were much too smart for that.
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  4. This is not a kernel issue. Or a “kernal” one, for that matter.
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  5. Remember they’re not really that “hidden”. On a multiuser system, the existence of a file with a particular name in your home directory betrays the fact that you have used a particular app. That’s a potential invasion of privacy.
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  6.  @mikeonthecomputer  You have to have execute access at least, if you want to share stuff with others. That’s all that’s needed to take a good guess.
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  7.  @OcteractSG  That’s the story I don’t believe.
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  8. The reason why Windows is a mess is largely down to the app developers (plus apathy from Microsoft). Back in the pre-Windows-95 days, configuration was done with these text-based .INI files. Which are such a neat idea that some software on Linux still uses them (and there is a standard Python module for parsing them!). But Windows never had a standard place to put the things. So they ended up scattered everywhere. Instead of defined a standard Windows equivalent to the /etc directory, Microsoft decided to make app developers get rid of .INI files, and put their config information in the Registry instead. But that just created a new mess. As for the rest of app installs, if Windows had a standard Linux-style package manage to keep track of where things went, that would make it much easier to reduce conflicts and manage upgrades en masse , as well as do clean uninstalls. Again, Microsoft shows no enthusiasm for the idea.
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  9.  @lale5767  Ever wondered why a Windows install requires half a dozen reboots?
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  10.  @lale5767  You tell me what they’re for, then.
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  11.  @lale5767  Conway’s Law says “Any piece of software reflects the organizational structure that produced it”. It is well-known among seasoned Windows users that you can fix 90% of problems (or at least make them go away for a while) by rebooting. You would think that Microsoft itself, with its special insight into the operations of a platform that it created, would have a better answer. But it appears that it does not.
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  12. The Blender folks did exactly this some years ago, and all credit to them. To compare, I just did ldo@theon:~> ls -d ~/.[!.]* | wc -l 251 ldo@theon:~> ls ~/.config | wc -l 203 I think that shows that a large number of apps have already converted.
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  13. Remember they’re not really that “hidden”. On a multiuser system, the existence of a file with a particular name in your home directory betrays the fact that you have used a particular app. That’s a potential invasion of privacy.
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  14. It’s easier than that, you can just redefine the HOME environment variable.
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  15.  Dwight A. Spencer  I heard of chroot(8) and chroot(2), but never chroot(3).
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