Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sun 5th Oct 2008 21:21 UTC
The netbook craze is currently in full swing, with these small laptops being advertised everywhere (at least here in The Netherlands); in fact, you can already get netbooks with 3G from the mobile phone carriers at severely reduced prices (but with a one or two year contract, of course). Netbooks are also welcomed by the Linux community as the break they've been waiting for: many netbooks are available with Linux pre-installed. One of the more successful (and powerful) netbooks out there is MSI's Wind, which is also sold under different brand and model names by other companies. In an interview with LaptopMag, MSI's Director of US Sales Andy Tung, however, has some bad news for those that believe the netbook will be the foot in the door that the Linux desktop has been waiting for.
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RE: Comment by Traumflug
by Thom_Holwerda on Mon 6th Oct 2008 09:04
in reply to "Comment by Traumflug"
Member since:2005-06-29
Neither registry entries nor config files are meant to be seen by the user, so the the only "user friendlyness" they feature is, they are invisible.
Which shows the fundamental problem of ALL modern operating systems: instead of actually *shock gasp horror* FIXING the problem, let's just hide it! Cover it up! Add another layer!
A good system doesn't need to hide stuff from its users. If you need to hide something because it's ugly - replace it with something that's not ugly.
RE[2]: Comment by Traumflug
by agrouf on Mon 6th Oct 2008 09:41
in reply to "RE: Comment by Traumflug"
Member since:2006-11-17
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Member since:
2008-05-22
Neither registry entries nor config files are meant to be seen by the user, so the the only "user friendlyness" they feature is, they are invisible. This invisibility is the same for a Windows registry as for Linux config files as for Mac OS X's way to store settings. Neither is more or is less user friendly than the other.
Apple by no means avoids config files, they just put them into $HOME/Library/Preferences instead of into hidden files into $HOME directly. Additionally, Mac OS X has a preferred format for config files, making them a bit more like on Windows.
The big disadvantage of the Windwos Registry is, due to it's nature to be a big single file, it's hard to do maintenance on it. You can easily remove applications and, even if you use an uninstaller, often registry entries stay in place and worsen (slow down) other parts of the experience.
If you simply spread setting into application-specific files, removal is trivial and even if you don't, the operating system won't bother about their existence. This way, Linux and Mac OS X maintain a better user experience without asking for even a single interaction from that user.