I've been using Linux since 1995, and while that doesn't quite elevate me to grizzled geekbeard status, it's long enough to have observed a whole lot of growth and changes. Most of them are good; but some of them are rather alarming. The changes that bother me the most are the ones that make it harder to understand and control your own system by adding needless complexity and layers of obscurity.

In the olden days most applications and services could be controlled with a single plain-text configuration file, so once you learned your way around it changes were fast and easy, and simple to replicate across multiple machines. But somewhere along the way a trend emerged that split these nice, useful single files into giant herds of files. So what was once simple, elegant, and useful became a big fat headache.

I want to blame Red Hat for this