What y'all talking about?
this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2025
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Win 7 was ok but remember, it still came with three control panels, a fucking registry and 8bit palette drwatson icon in system32 along with gigabytes of absolutely useless shit.
It was good for a windows, but it was still windows.
Nothing wrong with the Registry
It's a different way of handling things compared to how Linux (and most unixes) does it with 18391823 text files
But it's a perfectly functional and sensible solution for storing system configurations.
The registery is much easier to break, much harder to debug and much harder to fix, UNIX config is more human-friendly, I'll never mess with the registery again
The technology behind the registry is fine (which is what I think @VinesNFluff meant)
But it's execution in Windows was ass
In theory, a configuration manager with DB-like abilities (to maintain relationships, schematic integrity, and to abstract the file storage details), isn't a bad idea
But the registry as it is today is pure pain
Also add that registry exponantionally growing over time bad documented and not easy way to clean it up and thus as time going windows start booting up longer and longer
In theory having a database of configuration settings isn't a horrible idea.
But the execution was terrible.
No. It was not. The concept was OK, but the execution was not. Even Microsoft didn't know what was in there. The design was horrific. They could have used keywords, they could have had a data dictionary, they could have standardized it. They could have made it not get corrupted by glancing at it.
But they didn't, at least not for a long time. And it still sucks, just a little less.
A centralized place to store settings (e.g. the registery) isn't a bad idea in and of itself.
That.
I'll add that a lot of the issues people have with the registry have less to do with the registry itself (it's just -- A database of settings. Nothing shocking about that) and a lot to do with Windows' philosophy and the problems that creates.
Like yes, the registry of a computer that has been running windows for a few years is a bloated mess which creates a bunch of problems of its own -- But that's not in and of itself because the registry is a centralised binary database.
Rather it is because -- Well. Microsoft. Tech corporations in general. Want computers to behave like magic boxes. Not machines you have to learn to operate. This means that whenever you install something or modify something on windows, you are left in the dark as to a lot of the stuff going on under the hood. Windows error messages are very obscure and nonspecific. When you install something, do you know what it has added to your registry? What dlls it has dropped around your machine? And with so many third party programmes and utilities dropping into the system, that shit builds up, and not even an experienced user will fully know what has built up unless they've been making a deliberate effort to keep track.
Compare that to Linux, which is made by nerds FOR nerds... And so everything is thoroughly documented. With the general unspoken understanding that a. You will sooner or later go under the hood and mess about in there; and b. If something fucks up, whether it is directly your fault or not, you're the one who will have to fix it, so here's ALL the receipts on how shit works so you CAN do that.
I'd want a registry that was compartmentalized meaning each app gets an area to store its own configuration and the apps can only modify their own settings (without root permissions).
Apps should never be expected to modify system settings directly but only through system calls.
Some Linux packages achieve this kind of behavior by adding an additional user which owns their configuration directories. That always felt hacky to me.
Anyone who saw Mac at the time would know what pretty was for interfaces. Windows has never been pretty.