I just use TexStudio. I don't use proper tex files, but it never complains unless I were to try and compile. But their navigation tree and tabbed interface for multiple files makes organizing things really nice.
I can have multiple instances at once, and it's all managed via files and my filesystem.
Eventually I want to build a web frontend to index and reference my data, but for now the above approach is working well.
Unlike Obsidian, TexStudio is open-source, which I consider a plus.
I'm just talking about respect for convention. The same way on an FHS respecting distro a software should install to FHS paths and not, for example, make a new root level directory. There's a respect for user preferences there.
It's not about using technical means to restrict software, but about the OS providing certain mechanisms and there being an expectation for trusted software that it will respect those conventions.
That's why I don't consider a jail a solution. It's an extra step the user has to carry out, and I don't think the burden should be on the user if it doesn't have to be. While in one sense it's good security practice to treat every program as malware, most users are not going to do that nor should they have to.
A tool like Sandboxie on Windows solves that problem in one sense, but not the actual root of the problem, which is it being more acceptable than it should be to go against user preferences and convention.
> There is a very mature and very powerful system for this called Jails.
No, jails aren't really the solution to the issue I'm talking about.
It's 'a' solution, but not the ideal solution.
> This is simply not true. If I want to monitor an app in it's entirety I can easily do so on most unixy systems.
It is true, but I think you're missing my point. If I wanted to monitor any app on Windows I can do the same, I just need procmon from sysinternals.
> There is no mechanism for doing this on Windows as even the OS loses track of it sometimes.
There is, in fact there are numerous solutions.
The point was simply that there can be hostile installers that you require tools to see what they are doing on both Linux an Windows. Linux isn't special in any way in this regard.
I don't really understand your point here. It would make perfect sense to have two separate hives by sectioning off all the stuff users, even power users actually need access to. 'specific ACLs' have no bearing on that.
> That's a developer choice, not the registry in and of itself. You could just as easily have /etc filled files with GUIDs for file names.
For sure, that's why I said I have no issue with the concept but rather how it's used in practice.
> Microsoft does for Windows components to map the internal object ID of whatever they're dealing with; my assumption is for ease of recognition/documentation on their side (and generally the assumption that the end user shouldn't be playing around in there).
That's maybe fair, but most of that stuff isn't stuff the user even needs to access most of the time. Maybe separating it out from all the HKLM and HKCU software trees would have made sense.
> And no, we cannot just let applications do whatever they want in the shared config space without a way to trace things back to the original app.
We don't have to let them, but we do for the most part. We could use sandboxing technology to isolate and/or log, but mostly OSs don't do anything to restrict what an executable can do by default, at least as far as installing.
> At least in the Linux world I was able to just check what the distro scripts installed.
You can do this in Windows too sometimes, but it doesn't matter if it's a badly behaving app. There are linux installers that are just binary blobs and it would be a lot more work to monitor what they do also.
> NT is why I like Windows so much and can't stand Unix-likes. It is object-oriented from top to bottom,
This sounds like you are talking from a design perspective and the rest of your post seems to be from a usability perspective. Is this correct?
> Windows 11 is irritatingly macOS-like
MacOS is such an objectively inferior design paradigm, very frustration to use. It's Apple thinking 'different' for the sake of being different, not because it's good UI.
I only keep a W10 image around because it's still supported and W11 seems like a lot more work to beat into shape. OpenShell at least makes things much better.
I have no issue with the concept, but in practice the Windows registry is a lot more obfuscated than it needs to be. There can be trees and trees of UUIDs or similar, and there is no need for it to be so user unfriendly.
Part of this might be mixing internal stuff that people never need to see with stuff that people will need to access.
> only about 1% of them actually remove all the cruft they originally stick in (or populated during use). The result is bloat, a larger surface area for corruption, and system slowdown.
I think this is a myth partly spread by commercial offerings that want to 'clean and optimize' a windows install.
Most of the cruft left in the registry is the equivalent of config files in /etc not removed after uninstalling an app. That stuff isn't affecting performance.
It really was nice to be able to at least still use the system if the display driver is crashing. 800x600 at 16 bit or whatever it was is still better than nothing.
Still a minority of sysadmins though. Most seem to have embraced it to an extent that's honestly a little sad to see. I liked to think of the linux community as generally being a more technical community, and that was true for a long time when you needed more grit to get everything running, but nowadays many just want Linux to be 'free windows'.
> I'd love if it Microsoft simply abandoned NT and threw their weight behind the Linux kernel
Oh hell no!
Diversity in operating systems is important, and the NT architecture has several advantages over the Linux approach. I definitely don't want just one kernel reigning supreme, not yet at least - although that is probably inevitable.
I can have multiple instances at once, and it's all managed via files and my filesystem.
Eventually I want to build a web frontend to index and reference my data, but for now the above approach is working well.
Unlike Obsidian, TexStudio is open-source, which I consider a plus.