Embedding an EXE inside a .REG file with automatic execution

I mean, maybe that's a use case, sure, but I'm not likely to remember this is in my toolbox, much less assume it'll ever work.

run any command as any user once a minute

ETA: Took a couple of minutes, huh. A sibling comment mentions the dynamic linker, which apparently maintains a cache of well-known library locations in /etc. This yields execution as soon as a new dynamically linked executable is started, which probably qualifies as immediate. (More care would be required to avoid breaking the system in the process, though.)

Microsoft has been pushing for xml configuration files alongside applications, but even their own teams don't listen, so here we are.

I think this is just a design flaw of the implementation itself.

Why couldn't every entry have a few more fields under the hood:

  programsDependingOnThisEntry: [PROGRAM_FOO, PROGRAM_BAR]

In this example, references to actual installed programs would make sure that when you have orphaned data it can be removed automatically (or the choice given to you), much like apt might suggest that you have some packages that aren't used by any other piece of software anymore.

For informative purposes, maybe also add:

  entryFirstAdded: 2005.05.15 14:00
  entryLastChanged: 2006.11.04 17:35
  entryLastRead: 2008.10.13 13:00

They have a need for a mouse. They scroll the text using the scrollbar, they use it even for moving the caret to the above line when writing code! It makes me sad just looking at that.

For the general software user.... maybe. Seen advanced users and developers acting like that makes them seem very likely underestimating or ignoring the power of features like history and how you can combine and compose commands.

But a good command line is essential for replicating more complicating tasks on more than one machine. I still remember when computer magazines printed a ton of screenshots on how to do certain things. A command line can be short, simple and much easier to replicate.

I have no personal problem with ease of use or market success because of it. I do have a personal problem with the feeling that it looks people behave almost like they are being brainwashed to believe some very very bad behaviors are "ease of use".

> I don't believe however they just disregard the security issues,

As an example, AFAIK windows still hides extensions by default.

Whatever I do that I know is temporary, will go to /tmp and I know it will be deleted after I reboot. Windows users are not used to this concept and use their desktops as a makeshift /tmp/. They have to delete the files themselves and sometimes just forget it quickly growing to an aberrant state where the desktop is extremely polluted.

It may be some form of OCD with me, but it is very common among windows users and it IS ugly.

Because they are part of the name of the file. Note: my file manager even identifies the mime type without extension. That is how it should be, changing the extension should not make the file harder to use. To this day, AFAIK, windows file manager still uses the extension to identify file type, thus allowing the user to easily change it may break expectation. GNOME's nautilus, KDE's Dolphin and even Apple's finder do it right: press f2 and you can rename the file without changing the extension, unless you go out of you way for that.

It is also a security breach: image.jpg and image.exe may look the same.

> Why shouldn’t people use their desktop as they please?

Sure they should! But the fact that the OS lacks a working /tmp incentivizes a form of use that is disorganized and ugly.

> Why put drivers in the kernel?

Read about complaints about wacom tablet driver phoning home or printers drivers doing the same. To use my wacom tablet I simply plugged it. Since it is on the kernel, it will work on any architecture the kernel support. They didn't spent a dime to make it working on my raspi, for example. Also, once it is in the kernel, whoever change any internal api will fix every driver code to keep it working, so things that work once will work for a very long time. I met people who lost a TCE scanner and an ASUS mini projector because it wasn't supported by the most recent windows versions. The ASUS mini projector (disclaimer: I had a little involvement in the development of its driver) works on my rockpi4 just by plugging it; the windows experience with it is far from that simple.

Some apps do care about extensions but this is not really an OS thing. And some files have to have specific names but that's really a thing in any OS.

The problem is Windows does different things with files based on their extension, and hides their extension by default. Linux does neither.

They're not that important on Linux. Making files without extensions is simple and common.

Honestly, file extensions are an annoying GUI thing. In the command line you pass the file as parameter to a program, the extension doesn't matter. Simply clicking on a file provides no information to the operating system about what program to invoke though, there needs to be additional metadata. So graphical environments created this notion of file associations based on extensions to the file name.

mount is for filesystems not for other stuff.

I guess your distribution just didn't ship the needed Xorg config and at the time xorg wasn't autoconfiguring input devices.

So, uh, what? When was there a time that USB mice didn't work, unless it was semi-intentional misconfiguration of X (which makes your criticism one of pre-modern X, not of Linux; and of which, you'd be preaching to the choir)?

I feel like this is mostly due to flash wear on under-provisioned flash chips.

I sound drivers on linux have historically being (somtimes buggy but) extremely stable. I don't think it has anything to do with them belonging to the kernel; but I do get your point in terms of crashing potential.

> And video cards drivers aren't exactly the most famously reliable bits of code, having the entire display subsystem be restartable is an amazing boon to stability.

This is something I envy on windows: I once saw a warning on windows explaining that the display was restarted because the driver crashed and wondered that on linux I'd have to login through the network to do the same and would still lose everything that was running under X. Video drivers have been also so stable that it has been a non problem nevertheless.

>> Your computer shouldn't get slower over time

>Wish someone told my Android phone that!

Although I hear windows users saying that third party software are to blame and that windows 11 is better in this regard, this has not being what I saw with people who bought recent windows computers.

>That is one of the things Windows popularized. Auto-mount is a Linux thing. Heck I remember circa 2005 being yelled at online because I expected my USB mouse to work under Linux when I plugged it into my laptop, something Windows had been doing since 1997 or so.

In 1997 I can't tell much about how hot plugging would work with a USB mouse on linux. But my experience is much better than on windows these days. It is funny I plug a keyboard on a friend's computer and windows says "installing driver software for hardware..." and wastes some time installing a driver that should already been installed because the other keyboard already is a USB keyboard.

(And yes, that does make snaps a walled garden)

Sure I use the package manager in linux, and the google play store on android, and brew on mac, but they're all very limited and clunky by comparison. There is (relatively) little software for them. And if you want something older, or that isn't in the mainstream package manager, then you have to do unpleasant workarounds to trick or coerce the system into installing it. Then once you install something you have to hunt to find it, and there are bits scattered all over the system.

That's one thing I don't like about Windows, is that while it got much better at everything else, it also inherited the 'scatter stuff everywhere when installing' mentality from linux (or somewhere), and even went a step beyond that with the registry.

But at least we're beyond the days of 'DLL hell' and programs are usually pretty good about uninstalling themselves now. And there is some benefit to having user data under the user directory (especially for backups), although that could be an easy checkbox option during install or configuration.

Still would be better if 'portable program' style installation, where you just unzip it in a directory and there it is, the whole thing, right where you put it, was the default.

It absolutely does. I have friends running the latest Windows who still report speedups after reinstalling. Who knows what sort of cruft silently accumulates in a Windows system?

> you don't need to reboot all the time

You absolutely do. Not only do users still have to reboot, Windows has become ridiculously aggressive about rebooting and updating. It doesn't matter what users are doing, it will stop everything and spend an hour applying updates, rendering the computer useless because obviously people have nothing better to do than watch the computer reboot itself continuously while a progress percentage slowly increases on the screen.

'Curious, you say you do not like being stabbed in the face, and yet you use a knife to prepare your dinner'

It's a matter of who gets to decide where the walls are and who to trust. App Store/Google Play/Windows Store/macOS Store are not and never have been curated for software the user can trust, only things that do not harm the perceived interests of their owners. They are not trusted sources.

I call bullshit.

If you're not an admin, there's a whole host of things you just can't get done, and just makes life miserable for me, because that implicit suggestion that "some special person" should fo things scares users away from actually learning wtf it is they are doing. Systems do bog down over time, as evidenced by the need to clean up the massive amount of lint/waste that tends to be accrued over time. S-mode is an abomination. The effing continuous reboots as soon as you need to do something are the bane of my existence.

The Windows computer has become more anti-user over time, arguably anti-admin, and I'm just getting to the point of saying "fuck this shit, I'm out". I'm done being the guy M$oft devs externalize the costs of their lack of care to. Or maybe I'm becoming just like them with age in a sense.

t. Multi-household maintainer/debugger of all things technical

> No, they do not. A modern computer is extremely modular, and the driver subsystem should be equally modular and allow easy plug-and-play.

I get this.

> The Windows NT driver model excels at this, and the Linux model of compiling drivers into the kernel is comparatively asinine.

The linux driver model guaranteed me much better compatibility when using the SAME driver under different architectures and they continued worked when the kernel was updated.

> Every time I update the Nvidia driver on Arch I have to wait for it to compile into the kernel with DKMS.

This is a good example of the problems that happen when a driver is not in the kernel.

>For the record, I find some UNIX behaviours equally anachronistic.

Sure! One of my favorites: you can't have a directory with ":" in its name on your PATH.