Zak Elep wrote:
> Yeah. In Debian that's /var/lib/dpkg/*. At least with these package and BFS > systems you would know which files get left over after a remove (even a > purge)--In windows, for some software (mostly dl'd from the Net , mostly not > even by the user ;) you can't even remove them at all w/o fusking a dll or > two...
What's fusking?
In Windoze XP, you can delete and overwrite DLLs to your heart's content, the system will automatically (and often silently) restore the correct version of the critical ones. I hate the loss of control this gives you, but in practice, it sure makes things run smoothly and lets you get the job at hand done without much worry.
Mysterious undiagnosable errors still do pop up once in a blue moon which are seem solvable only by a reinstall, but they are much rarer than in previous editions of windows.
The nice thing in Linux (or Slackware at least) is that such mysterious-errors-requiring-an-OS-reinstall occur far far less often and virtually never happen for those who are familiar with the system. But part of this is probably due to the fact that Linux (or distros like Slackware) /force/ you to have certain knowledge of its innards before you can really get going.
In any case, if something screws up in Linux, I like the fact that I can count on Slackware's removepkg/installpkg to *quickly* and *100% cleanly* reset an application or _even shared libraries_ installation to default.
I love the fact that it is all about just deleting and copying of a straight set of files and nothing else... unlike in windows where there are mysterious system file directories and registry settings to worry about. Because there is essentially nothing else to worry about besides straight removepkg/installpkg of packages, even when you are experimentating with exotic 'virtually system-level' technologies like GNUstep, you know you can cleanly ungraft them from your system with a single command the only thing it does of which is to delete the exact set of files that's listed in /var/log/packages/GNUSTEP-package.
Now THAT is something you will never get from Microsoft and is why I say that [a proper] Linux [distro] is liberating.
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Anyway, the whole reason I was willing to give up Windows' more mature and plentiful desktop apps and environment for Linux's was that in Win 9X before, such productivity-sucking errors would happen every ten or so minutes. Now that Windows XP doesn't waste my time like that anymore, I fail to find a reason to go with a relatively more impoverished desktop environment.
I love my dual-monitor powered Windows desktop so much I use Linux through it - by logging on to my Linux machine via a 'Doze-based term client and using a 'Doze-based X server (I recommend X-Win32) to capably run most Linux GUI apps (including GIMP) on my 'Doze desktop!
That said, I am still rooting for Linux on the desktop (whether X-based or otherwise) to succeed and am still searching for the perfect cross-platform GUI development technology to use. I want a world where a developer can write most apps just once and have it work on different platforms (you get a bit of that with Java, but I want something without Java's deployment headache or GUI slowness, and I want to be able to do it using Python).
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