> Everybody is using a mix of Qt/GTK apps, and thanks to "just-for-gnome" turds like gconf nothing gets along and you have to google and dance around several incompatible configuration GUIs.

So now we have, Gnome-specific config storage, KDE-specific config storage, and the rest all uses its own config storage. So now we have at least two classes of apps that use their own standard config storage. Getting rid of GConf would mean all of those apps would use their own config storage, creating even more fragmentation. That would be better, how?

> Pardon me, but "instant apply" feature is not enough to excuse for this mess: yeah, I change something in Gconf and maybe 20% of apps pick up my change instantly. A whopping 20%, but INSTANTLY, was that the goal?

No idea where you pulled the 20% number from. It's always 100% in my experience with the exception of Firefox and font settings.

> They should have ALL kept using standard /etc

/etc is not a standard. Did you ignore what everybody else has been saying?

> + ~/.xxrc files

Oh like ~/.gconf?

> or came to an agreement to use something truly global, so I could enjoy the same font rendering or a freaking window colors in Skype and Pidgin. I can live without instant config changes but at least I could have grepped "color" and "window" appearing on the same line somewhere in /etc and in ~/.gtk or ~/.kde.

Agreed, but this problem has got nothing to do with GConf. Getting rid of the GConf you so hate will not solve this very problem.

> Tools like GConf are destroying one of the greatest UNIX strengths: scriptability.

gconf-tool. Completely scriptable. Enjoy.

> I keep versions of config files for selected software under git and simply push it to /etc when I need to quickly set up a new machine.

Put ~/.gconf in git. Enjoy.

> Nobody needs freaking "pluggable back-ends" because everybody needs to be able to instantly backup/restore selected applications configuration in a standard way

Yeah, if only those stupid GConf files are backup-able with standard tools like 'cp' or 'tar'! Oh wait... they are!

> And is it really worth it to run a freaking daemon so you can see your config changes instantly take effect?

It is really worth requiring an entire windowing system and fancy graphics just so one can see images in a web browser? We should just stick with telnet dammit!

Yes. Why not run a daemon? It eats maybe a few hundred KB of private RSS. Even an old desktop system by today's standard has 256 MB of RAM. The daemon also improves startup performance by caching a small set of active configuration settings in memory instead of having to constantly load them from disk, something which is not possible if every app parses the config files.

> Why not PDF?

Why PDF? I'll tell you why not PDF, because it's not a good format for storing config, what's why! You said there are lots of tools for editing PDF - but none of them are usable for editing key-value pairs. As opposed to XML tools. If the XML file hard to read? Use xmllint to reformat or to indent it. Edit with a standard text editor. grep, sed, awk, all work, I have no idea what you're talking about.

No, I think your fear for 2010 technology and your tendency to stick with 1970s stuff is more of a disease.