The Case for Gconf

There are only four things wrong with gconf.

The first thing that is wrong with it is that the config files are stored in the home directory; display properties are associated with the display, however, and therefore belong on the display.

The second thing that is wrong with it is that it doesn't use the platform standard, which is the X11 resource database. People complain about the Linux desktop being inconsistent--well, throwing away 20 years of tradition like that is what makes it inconsistent (Gnome keybindings are another example of that).

The third thing that is wrong with it that dumping kilobytes of XML into files is a lousy format for anything that humans need to look at, and humans need to look at their configuration files because they may not, in fact, want to use gconf tools.

The last thing is: they just don't work. Every time Gnome gets upgraded, something breaks substantially enough with preferences for me that I just have to erase them all and start from scratch. In contrast, my X11 resource database has been working for more than a decade without the need for change.

Gconf sucks. While its authors may think it's not like the Windows registry, in all important aspects it is, and the ways in which it isn't like the Windows registry are probably even worse than the Windows registry. I mean, after you give up on human readability and manipulability and network transparency, then you might as well use a real database to store the junk.

Gconf is probably the single worst part of Gnome.