Why has nobody done this?

[smugdou]

Linux and I are appraoching our second anniversary, and the amount I use Linux for various applications is rising again. I have to thank you guys for the marraige counselling when things have gone wrong, we wouldn't be together today if nobody was there to hold my hand through netconf or XF68config - which brings me to my point.

There seems to be so many different configuration files for networking, hardware etc. And an even greater number of programs to configure those files seeing as they often change depending on distro, most of them are a load of phish

Why has nobody tried to pull them all together into one user friendly, text-oriented program?

Forget making Linux easier to use to attract more people from windows, that will happen anyway. Lets improve it so that those that use it spend less time maintaining their system and more time getting work done.

[mdwatts]

This of course will turn into a rant and since this is a General question forum and not meant for 'rants', I will move this off to /dev/random where that crowd can offer their opinions.

[smugdou]

Sorry folks, was a bit :-)

[Dawa13]

well... it would take time, and we are stupid time happy morons... good idea, i will suggest ti to my brothers company.

[Fingel]

the reason why there are so many different ways of doing things in Linux, config files for example, is because, obviously, there are so many programmers working on it. Not all of them have the same Ideas, so things tend to get mixed up somtimes.

[Fryguy8]

look at man XF86 Config, then look at all the options for nvidia drivers, then look at all the options for DRI. That's just for 2 parts of 1 file, multiply that times hundreds, and you get why there hasn't been a standardized program to configure everything, you'd be missing out on a LOT.

[Strike]

Originally posted by smugdou
Why has nobody tried to pull them all together into one user friendly, text-oriented program?
Because this has shades of "Windows Registry" written all over it? :) (half-kidding)

Seriously though, a single point of failure is bad, not to mention the issues mentioned already. The UNIX Philosophy is to do one thing and to do it damn well. Well, this is a great philosophy but it leads to lots of disparate programs doing different things in different ways. As far as the desktop goes, I know that GNOME has a Registry-like thing that watches over settings named gconf. But it also has the control panel to configure things from. Anything that is part of the GNOME suite can conceivably be added to this. I'm sure the same goes for KDE. It's just for those "rogue" (ie, unaffiliated with any unifying desktop solution) apps that this really seems to be a problem.

[linuxgeek]

The reason why is because then Linux would be gay like mac. I mean look at mac. It's so easy to use i almost pee in my pants trying to use it because it doesn't make sense for something to be that easy to use. I'm used to have to look god knows where for something. Then i get to a mac and it's all right there. It's just to confusing.

[saithan]

in a minor sense it has been done with redhat version 7.1-7.3
the console command :
setup
would create a text based interface with the various config tools:

auth config
firewall config
keyboard
mouse
network
printer
system services
sound card
time zone
x config

although each tool remained seperate it did allow an easy way to change allot ofthe configs really fast.