"and a GUI is used to provide easy access to the application" How do you think the GUI finds the application? There is a PATH. Open up a cmd and type the name of any installed program.
1) Programs put themselves in various directories on my windows 7 machine, some are under \Program Files, some are under \Program filees (x86), some are \Programs and so on, variations and variations.
2) to locate a program you need to know its corporation, which people often dont know. There are setup.exe start.exe fireup.exe and run.exe and variations, which one should the user use to start the program?
3) all the applications components are not in a single place but are spread out over \Program-Files, \Windows\system, \windows\xx\xx and the registry at the least. Then they put stuff in \users\application data\ and \users\xx\applications or whatever.
You and many people dont understand where anything goes because unlike for Windows, GNU/Linux systems actually make sense and actually have a structure (that is different from windows) which you need to learn to operate the system, just as you learned to navigate the mess of windows.
I thought the many of the shortcuts used fullpaths in windows I'm pretty sure not all of them can be accessed with name in cmd. Looking at the .desktop files under /usr/share/applications (ubuntu) most execute by name but some especially games(both third party and some gnome games) use fullpaths.
In Windows from a cmd.exe prompt you rely on the contents of %PATH% to access programs. This is a holdover. In Windows proper there are other methods; from cmd.exe you can use the 'start' program to invoke executables in a Windowsy way. The most convenient/reliable way to set up an easy to use/remember way to launch an executable in Windows is to go to the registry and locate hklm/software/microsoft/windows/currentversion/app paths/, inside of which are a series of keys. Each key is the name of an alias and its default reg_sz value is the path to the executable to invoke when the alias is passed to 'start' (or entered into the run prompt, or what have you). You will find a number of these already in existence on any Windows box, most notably iexplore.exe.
1) Programs put themselves in various directories on my windows 7 machine, some are under \Program Files, some are under \Program filees (x86), some are \Programs and so on, variations and variations.
2) to locate a program you need to know its corporation, which people often dont know. There are setup.exe start.exe fireup.exe and run.exe and variations, which one should the user use to start the program?
3) all the applications components are not in a single place but are spread out over \Program-Files, \Windows\system, \windows\xx\xx and the registry at the least. Then they put stuff in \users\application data\ and \users\xx\applications or whatever.
You and many people dont understand where anything goes because unlike for Windows, GNU/Linux systems actually make sense and actually have a structure (that is different from windows) which you need to learn to operate the system, just as you learned to navigate the mess of windows.