Oh, man, I just ride in 'em ... I don't know what makes 'em work.
The majority of people who use computers are not technical, AND THEY DON’T WANT TO BE!
They want their computer to be like the old TV’s.
Those TV’s had:
An on/off button
A rotary dial for the channels.
People these days still want much the same.
An on/off button.
One channel to get/send email
One channel to see pics of the grandkids
One channel to show them the weather
One channel to show highlights of last nights Lakers game
They don’t want to know about SUDO’s and program fixes and hacker attacks!!
And NO MATTER WHAT they do, when they turn their machine off and then turn it back on, it should GO BACK TO THE STATE IT WAS IN when they first turned it on.They can still see their emails (maybe out on the Cloud), but Javascript or Flash or some other bastid didn’t come along and wipe out their hard drive or hijack their internet connection.
It’s very poor design, whether it be Windows or Linux, to let some application tweak the registry or modify functionality without thorough testing and acceptance. Any decent SDLC (software development life cycle) person can tell you that.
Hey, man... you are preaching to the choir - I am enough of a duffer to prefer .cfg/.ini right in the folder with the executable - I have never understood the need for a registry at all. Every now and then I still run into software designed that way - Simply DEL the directory and the program, and everything to do with the program is instantly 'uninstalled'.
I firmly believe that the only reason for a reg is for obfuscation purposes.
The majority of people who use computers are not technical, AND THEY DON’T WANT TO BE!
Yup... Maybe not quite as fervent as you - My favorite clients are the ones that knew their stuff back in the DOS-Win9x days... Not necessarily much more than super-user, let's say (which you kinda HAD to be back in the day)... But they aren't scared off if you have them open a cmdbox, and simple routines (AV scans, backup jobs, etc) are allowed for and assumed to be worthy of learning...
I think it is a shame to dumb-down the system for crayola-eating idiots. I think there is an inherent learning curve (albeit a fairly simple one) that must be accomplished for reasonable operation. And for the most part, my clients are happy to be taught the basics.
Oh, man, I just ride in 'em ... I don't know what makes 'em work.
Up until the 60’s, you had to turn on the radio and wait a minute for the tubes to warm up before you could listen. Then we got transistors - turn it on and listen immediately. Now, the radio has a computer. Turn it on, wait a minute or 2 until it boots up, and if they don't force an immediate FW upgrade on you, you can listen to the radio. Seems like we are going in the wrong direction.