Re: [PATCH] Documentation: reword the distinctive feature of shared state

[Alyssa Ross <hi@alyssa.is>]

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Valentin Gagarin <valentin@gagarin.work> writes:

>>> - s/backed up and//
>>>
>>>    The difficulty of backing up is a specific instance of the
>>>    fragmentation problem.  But this is likely only evident to Qubes
>>>    users.  We can expect most readers to know about it theoretically at
>>>    best.  While it's not wrong to have this sort of anchor, keeping it
>>>    risks diluting the main message.
>> 
>> I'm concerned that removing the more specific verbs here might make it
>> more difficult to understand /why/ treating the system as a whole is
>> desirable.  We don't have to be so specific as to call out backups or
>> management, but I think without talking about something more specific,
>> even if that's just "thinking", as in "one only needs to think about a
>> single system", it loses its motivation.
>
> Yes, what we're trying to convey here feels tricky to get right.  Not 
> sure "thinking of" is more specific than "treating", but maybe it better 
> gets across a sentiment of "conceptualising" (in the sense of: mentally 
> grasping).  In my drafting I was mainly focused on the interaction with 
> the system, since I came from the original which worked with examples of 
> handling the system and thus *implied* some thinking.  Maybe thinking is 
> just the right thing.  At least this sounds perfectly fine to me:
>
>      This means that the system can be thought of as a whole, rather than
>      many virtual machines each becoming a system of its own.
>
> One could argue that thinking about a system is a very specific 
> interaction we perform very often...
>
> Feel free to fix it up like that, otherwise I'll give it another round 
> of ideas.

Thinking about it some more, I wonder if maybe my emphasis on verbs was
misplaced.  The underlying thing I wanted to communicate is the feeling,
and I was relying on the verbs to connote those feelings to the reader.
The relevant feelings here are "burdened" and "overwhelmed".  Perhaps
there's a better way to get those across, either directly or indirectly.
What do you think?

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