Re:My transition to an Ubuntu workstation
by Crinus on Wednesday October 23, 2019 @07:10AM
(#21333354)
Well yeah, but it isn't specific to registry or even to Windows, you could get that with pretty much any extensible system. In Window Maker, for example, you can set up the application menu to use a dynamically filled entry so i wrote a shell script that scan my Steam folder to fill the installed games. Any mistake there could have had a similar outcome (e.g. launching Steam every time i right clicked on the desktop or generating an endless .\.\.\.\.\.\.\. list from not skipping the . directory or whatever). KDE and GNOME have many extensions and people already complain about GNOME's performance when it comes to shell extensions.
Speaking of Explorer, one of the classic ways to end up with a Windows system that's slow for no readily apparent reason is shell extensions. Either on the rightclick menu or in the thumbnail engine. At one point I had a folder I couldn't navigate to without getting an error popup that mentioned Nvidia in it - a chain of handlers had been installed such that JPEG decoding was delegated to the graphics card, so trying to create and cache the thumbnail of a corrupt file crashed in an unrelated-looking place.