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this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2023
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Linux
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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Your post is incredibly informative and helpful, so this isn't aimed at you at all, but this kind of fix is why Linux is not ready for the everyday average user.
Meh, it could be done in a repair utility, but there's no central power to distribute it and systems can be setup in too many different ways for it to make sense. This is part of the advanced Linux learning curve, not necessary for regular use. Windows can get hosed as well but requires a reinstall because tools like this are not easily available (or you fix windows with Linux).
Windows is difficult to repair mainly because of the registry, IMHO. Microsoft’s claims that it should never require cleanup doesn’t really make sense… it’s the most practical advice given how convoluted it is, but the fact that a database that keeps getting written to constantly doesn’t ever need any kind of maintenance just doesn’t make sense to me.
I still don't understand why windows has the registry as well as per user appdata and some configuration files buried in windir. Even if the registry was just dumped into files, the space requirements would be minimal by today's standards (yeah it's a lot of small files, so maybe there's something to be done there, but still a file based system would do) aaand caching and hashing will still work just fine.
Legacy API and app behaviour support. Ironically replacing the registry with something more straightforward would be relatively easy, unlike adding support for storing home directories on a drive other than C. Technically you can mount a different filesystem under c:/users to achieve this, but AFAIK that’s neither supported nor trivial to do.
I tried doing it, and gave up. Sure, most software will respect the path changes in the user’s registry hive, however, every once in a while a program will just assume that your home dir lives under c:\documents and settings$username - and that’s when it all goes south. Really frustrating this lack of consistency.
All in all, the OS is riddled with hacks and “supports” for legacy runtimes and behaviours. Heck, my username is poking fun at the fact that Windows 7 had support for the 386 (yes, Intel’s 80386 processor from the late 80’s) enhanced API. Windows 7…. My username is a “tribute” to a file called krnl386.exe that implemented a bunch of legacy API calls like how much RAM a system has or whether or not the OS is running in “386 enhanced mode” that were relevant back in Windows 3.x days… and still supported in Windows 7. That pretty much sums up why Windows is, and always will be, a hot mess.
Lol we need regfs, so we can edit the registry with awk and sed.
To be fair, average users would never (or should never) encounter such an issue. The person asking uses Arch (I think?) which is by far not an “average person” distribution.