Warp wrote:
> (I have never heard of anybody doing that; certainly I have
> never encountered the need).

I've done it ever so occasionally, but usually by the time I figured out it 
broke something, it has been too late to fix it that way. I think the 
corporate world likely uses it more often.

>   Every time Windows installs a new version of .NET, it writes a huge amount
> of files to the C: drive. These are important files and cannot be removed
> (unless you really want to uninstall .NET, making many programs not work).

Yep. Every new version has basically a complete copy of the whole thing, and 
.NET is really pretty big.  .NET 2.0 programs break if you install only .NET 
3.5 runtime, because they're trying to avoid DLL hell. You *could* uninstall 
the 2.0 runtime tho, if you weren't still using it.

>   There are tons of temporary files which are *not* removed by Windows' disk
> cleaning utility. You have to manually search for them and remove them.
> Those alone accounted for several tens of megabytes.

It always ticks me off that things like Java and Adobe and QuickTime and all 
those people are too lazy to write the plug-in that'll let "disk cleanup" 
delete the stuff. Having to track down where Java is caching every applet I 
ever looked at and Adobe is storing every font it uses like I can't download 
it faster than Adobe can read it from the disk is rather a PITA.

Indeed, I'm a bit annoyed that firefox doesn't plug into that system as 
well. :-)  I really don't want to go to every program that might be holding 
a bunch of stuff cached and find the appropriate menu entry to clean it off.

>   Every time you install a program, even if you don't install it in C:,
> Windows will write uninstallation info for that program in the C: drive.
> AFAIK there's no way around it. The only way to remove them safely is
> to remove the program itself.

Unfortunately, the number of uninstallers is similar to the number of 
installers, so unless you get everyone using the standard systems (which, of 
course, become legacy with new standards showing up every year or so) you 
can't necessarily interpret the data to remove it.

> many of the programs don't remove the data when they are uninstalled.

Yeah. The old uninstallers would just delete that which they installed, 
without actually cleaning out the data left behind. Usually leaving 
directories sitting around where the game had saved state into the program 
files subdirectories. Kind of a safety thing - don't uninstall the data just 
because you uninstalled the program. Reasonable, but annoying sometimes.

>   I have never noticed this phenomenon in Linux. It doesn't grow over time,
> even if you regularly install and uninstall programs.

It cleans up after itself better, perhaps. New functionality makes it grow, 
of course. I'm sure if you install OpenOffice, build a bunch of 
spreadsheets, then uninstall OpenOffice, you don't wind up deleting those 
spreadsheets. If you uninstall Beagle, it leaves all its thumbnails and crap 
around, too. The dot files don't go away when you delete a program.

The problem with Windows is every program somehow feels the need to cache a 
bunch of crap and not hook into the standard ways for cleaning that up.

> is easy enough). Even if some programs do write tons of data there, it's
> somehow easier to find that data and remove it if you don't need it anymore.

Yeah, it's all dot files in the home directory, for the most part. On the 
other hand, Linux I think has far fewer background type services. Stuff to 
watch for updates will, for example, grow with the size of the repository.

> It's more hidden and somehow more "silent" in Windows.

I wonder if it's because it's more heirarchical and library-driven in 
Windows than in Linux. I.e., there's not just "a dot file in your home dir", 
but "a dot file inside a product directory inside a vendor directory inside 
one of three different hidden directories depending on how you're logged in" 
sort of thing.

But nowadays, most of the stuff that's per-user cruft winds up in 
/users/warp and usually /users/warp/appdata, organized pretty logically if 
you actually go exploring.

>   But the point is that program data tends to keep confined inside your
> home directory (inside subdirectories starting with a dot), rather than
> being scattered all over the system.

That's not really true. The global stuff in Linux is in global places in the 
system, like /var and such. I was frequently running out of room in /var and 
had to go in and clean things up, altho I don't remember now what it was 
that was sticking things in there.

You have to clean up web server logs, audit logs, wtmp, all that sort of thing.

Granted, everyone and their uncle writes crap into your home directory in 
Windows, and then leaves it there indefinitely. I don't think you can 
reasonably complain tho that installing programs leaves data installed in 
your system directories. :-)

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   I ordered stamps from Zazzle that read "Place Stamp Here".

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