12 Dec
2011
12 Dec
'11
7:34 a.m.
On Dec 12, 2011, at 9:40 AM, Liam Proven wrote:
I suspect most Mac users barely know their machines
have a shell and
never, ever use it. If Ubuntu gets to that point as well, that will be
just fine - so long as people can do what they want and need to do.
Well yes, and that's the key, isn't it? I think the single most infuriating part
of Windows to me is that the system configuration isn't in human-readable text files,
it's in inscrutable key/value pairs in a giant global registry. It makes it
impossible to have any real kind of manual control over the operation of the system unless
you are a warlock. On Linux and OS X, you can almost always edit a text file somewhere
that will be vaguely understandable even if you've never seen it.
Classic Mac OS had binary preference files, but half the time they could be easily
modified with ResEdit, and with very few exceptions, most applications could at least
handle having their preference files deleted as basically performing a "factory
reset".
- Dave