On Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 05:34:31AM -0600, The Fool wrote: > > From: Nick Arnett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > > And the following bears repeating: The Windows registry is an > > abomination. > > As compared to the linux method? Or the AS/400 method? AS/400's are > an abomination.
I don't know AS/400. But the linux method is more robust than the Windows registry method. Almost all of the configuration for my linux system is stored in text files in the /etc/ directory, with some other stuff stored in .* files in my /home/username/ directory. In total, it comprises at most a few megabytes, so it is easy to backup. It is stored in multiple files, so if one gets munged, all the others are still okay. It is stored in ASCII text so I can edit it easily with any text editor that I like. It is very rare in linux to have one program modifying the config file of another (and even then, it can usually only happen if you do something dumb as root), but in a registry system programs can mess with others since it is all in 1 or 2 files. The vast majority of linux programs' config files are well documented, so I can almost always repair any damage that occurs by editing the file (in the rare case that damage does occur). And since I run Debian with apt, I back up the config file for the installed packages, and restoring a system from scratch is simply a matter of copying my /etc/ and /home directory config files in, copying in the packages config, and doing apt-get dist-upgrade. That puts back all of my installed applications in one shot, even updating to the latest versions of each. Try that in Windows! There really isn't a lot of reason to run Windows on your home computer any more. I use Windows at work because I don't have much choice. But for home productivity use, linux can do 99% of what you can do with Windows, and it does it much better in most cases. If you need to exchange files with Windows users, that isn't really a problem: .xls and .rtf programs work quite well in Linux, and if you just can't live without MS Office (.doc, .ppt, .etc), there is always Open Office http://www.openoffice.org/ which gives you file compatibility with MS Office. -- "Erik Reuter" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.erikreuter.com/
