Separate OS and Applications

[commissar_mo]

WINDOWS 7

This may be pure science-fiction (and hopefully soon reality)... but I want to be able to install my programs on a separate drive from the OS... so when I reinstall the OS, all my settings, program configs, and all kinds of other tweaks are untouched.

1. I know that I can simply install programs on the other drive, but I've heard (and this makes sense) that once you knock out the OS and reinstall it, various registry files and other things have integrated the program intimately with the OS.

Is this this true?


2. Why is it not possible to completely separate programs from the OS? I feel like this would be a HUGE advancement in OS technology. Is it true that OSX operates somewhat like this, or am I mistaken? I believe I heard somewhere that the OS and the programs function much more independently there...

Ideally, I feel like the OS would just be another program (obviously the most 'important one') which interacted with other programs which could stand on their own. It really feels like we're still using 80s era architecture sometimes...

 

[hang-the-9]

You can install the programs to another drive, but you are correct in the fact that once you re-install the operating system, most of the programs won't work.

Your idea about separating Programs and OS is not very new, but it will never properly work unless you have maybe 4 applications in the world and no more. How will you keep track of what application uses what resources and ensure it does not interfere with others. The whole point of having a central registry and driver/system file store is to prevent every application using thier own custom files that may or may not crash anything else. The whole "dll hell" thing is exactly due to applications using their own versions of .dll files while disregarding the fact that other applications may need to use the same .dll with the same name.

 

[commissar_mo]

Fair enough (and thanks for the reply hang-the-9, we meet again)... but I definitely feel there's a more advanced OS architecture out there waiting to be built.

With today's ever-increasing CPU throughput, one might imagine completely separate OS and apps, with software plugins linking them together to perform the kind of centralized management of hardware resources you mentioned.

But if they were separated at any time (i.e. you delete the OS and reinstall or something) you would have everything discrete and would just download the universal plugins for every program.

Maybe in Windows 19 they'll have that.