On Wed, Dec 30, 2020 at 12:46:37AM +0000, steve-ALUG@hst.me.uk typed:
Quite why UI designers decided that nice editable INI files or even XML files were bad, and instead they should create a proprietary registry-like config structure (dconf, gconf etc), editable only manually through an equivalent of regedit, escapes me!
I much prefer the approach of something like fluxbox which has particularly clear config files.
Really all gnome does seems to is to serialise the current state of the UI (and much else as well!) into a binary file.
The file (a single point of failure) is constantly updated with various pieces of data. It's not a good candidate from restoring from a backup since it contains timestamps for things like updates.
I also noticed that settings are kept for software which has been removed and there are settings for things like SuSE's YaST (on ubuntu!).
It's not very UNIX like and more like Windows as you say!
-- Steve Mynott steve.mynott@gmail.com cv25519/ECF8B611205B447E091246AF959E3D6197190DD5