Free software scares normal people

Good article, but the reasoning is wrong. It isn't easy to make a simple interface in the same way that Pascal apologized for writing a long letter because he didn't have time to write a shorter one.

Implementing the UI for one exact use case is not much trouble, but figuring out what that use case is difficult. And defending that use case from the line of people who want "that + this little extra thing", or the "I just need ..." is difficult. It takes a single strong-willed defender, or some sort of onerous management structure, to prevent the interface from quickly devolving back into the million options or schizming into other projects.

Simply put, it is a desirable state, but an unstable one.

> to prevent the interface from quickly devolving back into the million options

Microsoft for a loooong time had that figured out pretty well:

- The stuff that people needed every day and liked to customize the most was directly reachable. Right click on the desktop, that offered a shortcut to the CPL for display and desktop symbols.

- More detailed stuff? A CPL that could be reached from the System Settings

- Stuff that was low level but still needed to be exposed somewhat? msconfig.

- Stuff that you'd need to touch very rarely, but absolutely needed the option to customize it for entire fleets? Group Policy.

- Really REALLY exotic stuff? Registry only.

In the end it all was Registry under the hood, but there were so many options to access these registry keys depending what level of user you were. Nowadays? It's a fucking nightmare, the last truly decent Windows was 7, 10 is "barely acceptable" in my eyes and Windows 11 can go and die in a fire.