The outer post was talking about helping family members with their computers. They're gonna be dragging files around in the Linux equivalent of Explorer, not ex

The outer post was talking about helping family members with their computers. They're gonna be dragging files around in the Linux equivalent of Explorer, not extracting stuff to tmp and manually applying diffs. So doing a 1:1 comparison on that basis, the Registry has the standard tools of the trade on Linux beat. There's certainly no particular reason you couldn't send someone a .sh file that manually applies your diffs to grandma's config file, I guess... FWIW I've had Ubuntu system updates blow away entire config files (helpfully setting the old one aside, at least) instead of applying diffs, but maybe that was the package maintainers being naughty.