12-07-05 - 1

12-07-05

I'm sort of sick of ranting about Windows, but this morning I'm again sickened by it. Aside from windows being a horrible cruft of shit piled on top of shit, the whole design of the OS is just so wrong and rotten. MS seems to think of the whole computer as one big tangle with the OS. They want to put your data under c:\windows, for god's sakes. The registry is such a cock-assed wrong-headed way of doing system config and app linkage.

The computer should be divided into three distinct regions : the OS, the apps, and the data. Contrary to MS's nonsense, this division is crucial to system stability and security, because it preserves the integrity of the OS and the user freedom to choose their apps.

The OS should be firewalled and untouchable by apps. The OS itself can then be upgraded or re-installed without affecting the apps at all. The OS should be configured by config files which are separate and in the protected user data space. The OS also facilitates the linkage of apps, eg. this app provides this service to this app (such as file extension plugs), and again that linkage is in a small separate data space. This is separate from critical system things like driver config, system config, and each app's own internal config.

Each app should be sandboxed. Eg. it installs all its own stuff in its own dir. Necessary linkage goes through the aforementioned file. Apps never get to install stuff into the OS space, but users can redirect OS functionality to apps as desired.