🚀 go-pugleaf

Bluuuue Rajah wrote:

> 
> Everybody rightly criticizes Micro$tiff for selling a crappy OS, and
> Linux is obviuosly better, if you have the time and the expertise to use
> in it, but until this week I didn't understand exaclty why Windows is
> such a POS.
> 
> When I had to uninstall the Google toolbar because Google installed an
> update tht I didn't ask for, which overrode IE5's ctrl-f command, the
> reason beame clear.  Windows' install/uninstall method causes bugs to
> accumulate, if programs are not ununstalled in precise the reverse order
> of which they were installed.
>
Uhm. Well, IE5 _is_ badly outdated. It won't display many websites
correctly.
To be fair, same goes for firefox 1.0x and old netscape versions, for
windows as well as linux ...
 
> The problem is that terrible method of saving old copies of system
> files, like .ini files, as backups, to be restored when software is
> uninstalled.  So the more apps you uninstall, out of order, the buggier
> your system becomes, until you finally have to reinstall the OS.
>
Hmm. Usually, each new version of software in windows will either continue
to work with the current registry keys and maybe add one or the other
value, or it will create a new key with version number and use that.
Uninstalling may or may not remove that key, but if you reinstate the old
version, it should find useful settings or use defaults.
Of course, registry may become a bloated mess after many
installs/uninstalls.

> Linux apparently doesn't have anything resembling this problem, which
> makes me wonder, how did the Linux designers (Torvald?) handle this
> problem, and can we learn anything from their solution to help minimize
> the problem with Windows?
> 
Linux works with configuration files. When updating, the existing files are
usually reused and maybe new parameters are added. Main version changes may
use differently named config files and even coexist with the old version.
When uninstalling, usually the configs are saved by renaming unless you
purge completely, so if you later reinstall that software or a newer
version again, you have fresh defaults but you can still copy statements
from the old saved files (and later on delete them).