Comments by "SmallSpoonBrigade" (@SmallSpoonBrigade) on "Why Doesn’t Microsoft Dump the Registry?" video.

The fact that that's even a thing is a good reason for MS to deprecate the registry and offer some sort of per application registry for those that haven't yet migrated away from it.
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That's less of a problem now than it used to be, but it's still a problem and it's mostly because those apps are trying to write to are read from things that they shouldn't ever have been accessing.
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@bountyjedi There's a fair number of utilities that can be used in managing those files, anything that edits text files can potentially be used. With a few minutes worth of scripting, you can even automate revision control over it and see what changes are being made over time in case something does go wrong.
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@RKingis Yep and I've done that, although you kind of have to know what you're wanting to backup. Which is fine if you're manually editing it, and a bit of a problem if a program is doing it in the background for you.
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Only because they spend decades fixing the many issues that come of it. One of MS' addictions is being overly careful about backwards compatibility even when it causes problems later on because you can still load files from decades earlier, ones that most people have had many years during which to update to a more recent standard.
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That was never a real problem for most people. There just aren't enough files for configuration for that to be a problem.
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@orangejuice7964 The only real reason to retain the registry is that it was a convenient way to make it harder to port programs to other OSes. It doesn't make it that much harder, but every little bit helps.
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That's because they eventually got it fixed. It used to be both broken and stupid.
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@lmoelleb It's not as much of an issue now as it used to be, but I've had registry corruption take down entire systems, especially in older versions of Windows and if you start to get bloat, it's not easily cleaned up without risking damage to the registry itself. With the exception of per key permissions, which isn't by default on other OSes, I don't see anything in the video that justifies such a weak point being included in an OS. All of that can be done with other OSes using things like remotely mounted homes, group permissions and the like. And, in most cases, the options just work better with less trouble and can be cleaned up relatively easily.
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@tunderhay On *nix that stuff is stored in predictable places, things that are stored for the system at larger are generally in /etc for the base, in /usr/local/etc for system wide default configuration files. And in /home/user/ for user specific configuration files. And, unlike with Windows, you can nuke a users configuration files for everything, without impacting the system at large and depending upon the program.
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@meph5291 The per key permissions can be a bit of a pain by default, but I do question a bit how often that's really the appropriate tool when you can, and should, apply permissions to both the device, executables and configuration files that you need to work with those. It seems to me that the main reason that Windows has per key permissions is because they didn't properly design their security model.
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No, it's not. That's why you write to a new file and then copy it into place when completed or buffer the write. Also, apart from a failing drive, I can't remember the ever happening. I have, however, had the registry go bad a few times and take my entire install out with it. And if any of that's a concern, you really ought to have a USP protecting the computer from power problems.
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With modern disks being so large, fat packages are often times a reasonable solution to a lot of different problems. I wouldn't go so far as to say that all programs should be like that as I think that goes a bit too far.
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We can, they just have chosen not to virtualize it for the programs that legitimately need it as part of a phase out period.
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Which is the right thing to do. The settings should be in some combination of the install directory and user home directory as appropriate. If you've got a system wide package system like on Linux and most of the other *NIX OSes, then you can put the settings elsewhere.
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@sepg5084 I have personally had multiple Windows installs taken down due to registry problems. And I've been using windows since 3.0. The registry used to break horribly if you did a lot of installing, uninstalling and reinstalling of software.
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@Zullfix The issue with the registry is that it's a single point of failure that other OSes mysteriously don't need. Other OSes can figure out how to build a quick list of the settings people need to access quickly from configuration files at boot and leave the rest on disk where they largely don't interact with each other at all.
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@fisyr Why not? It works on other OSes without any problems. Any 3rd party software should be checked for by the program if it's that sensitive.
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This nonsense started well before that was an issue. It wasn't until I started to use USB drives and the like that I started to have disks popping up with changing letters. Floppy drives were basically always A; and/or B: and the primary HDD started with C and continued to the end of the disk before moving onto the next disk. In practice, there was no inconsistency as there would usually be only one drive and probably only one partition per drive. The only reason I have problems with drive letters changing now is because I'm swapping a pair of disks for backup that I want to use the same drive letter.
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@ViciousVinnyD MS used to only enforce their copyright against businesses that were illegally pirating their software because it was better for business to have that unlicensed copy than have them using Mac OS, Linux or something else entirely.
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@SoftwareRat That depends what software you're running. There's some pretty important software that's running only on Windows. But with how hard many major vendors are going after the SaaS model, more of those will likely be websites in the future which would make it harder and harder for MS to maintain that.
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@cromulence Or somebody who has been using Windows long enough to have seen the many problems that have arisen from it over the decades compared with how other systems handle the same basic problems.
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@kipchickensout Anything you like, from simple soft links to revision control systems to basic rsyncing a backup to a separate directory/system. And since they're mostly just text files, you can use any other utility you like to quickly parse and potentially modify them. The problem with the Windows registry more than anything is that it tries to do too much and doesn't have any particularly good way of purging obsolete entries or fixing it when it gets corrupted. I've thought for decades at this point that if they want to have a registry fine, but at least have it generated from other files that can be edited by hand if need be. I've just had too many times where the registry got corrupted and took the entire system down. I have never had that happen, not even once, with Linux of FreeBSD. I haven't paid as much attention to Linux, but FreeBSD has sysctl that does a lot of the same stuff that the Windows registry does, but it's regenerated on boot from actual files. As to your question, there are a lot of utilities for managing those dotfiles https://dotfiles.github.io/utilities/
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It's actually harder to do that with the registry than with configuration files. A short shell script can both check the file into the revision control system and make the edit with little fuss or muss. Or, you can do it without the script at all in like 3 lines of commands. And really, it's only one line if you're concerned about having that backup.
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There are tools, for example zeroinstall and just using the no-install version of software. Many, if not most, software programs these days offer that. At least as far as free and opensource software goes.
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Modern Windows permissions are a lot better than they used to be when the registry was first created.
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@mikechappell4156 Years ago, I had problems with the montor settings not being stored beyond the boot, so I exported that portion of the registry and imported it after I booted up. It was stupid as a better system wouldn't forget something like that.
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You could also go back to using a registry that is created from those ini files, something along those lines has worked well for FreeBSD for decades where much of the sysctl does come from editable configuration files.
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You can do that with Windows, but it requires that the software be setup like that. I'm grateful that more and more programs are at least offering a no-install version of their software.
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@xpusostomos Those are much more common now than they used to be. It's getting to be a lot less common for programs to not have a no-install version that is essentially just a self-contained directory that contains everything that it needs to run.
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A decade or two ago it being "too entrenched" might have been a compelling argument, these days, they could easily capture and redirect the attempts to write to or read from the directory either to actual files or smaller virtual-registries if they wanted to. They could also have a system like on other OSes where the registry is built from other files and just regenerates whenever the OS boots up. Parts that don't change can potentially be cached without much harm. It would be a much better system than what we've got now.
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You can easily back those files up or use revision control for any time you manually edit them on Linux. The same isn't really the case with the Windows registry.
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It was always a terrible solution to the problem of storing configuratoin information. Sysctl from FreeBSD is a much better system and there are other systems that other OSes use as well. At a quick look you can identify a bunch of setttings and you can either adjust them once using a built in tool or you can have it changed more or less permanently by editing one of the files it reads. Some portions cannot be changed at different run levels and sometimes you need to adjust the permission to do any operation on it at all. In the years I've been using the OS, I have never had any problems with that system. I have, however, had the registry cause significant problems at various times on Windows that required a reinstall. That hasn't happened in a while, so perhaps they've finally got that fixed.
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@Lofote Only because MS refuses to write the code to visualizer it. There's no reason why they can't just present those programs with a readable version and then write whatever bits they want to a separate file that can be loaded next time the program is run. Especially since such software probably shouldn't be making system-wide changes anyways.
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Apple uses a userland that's mostly from FreeBSD and had been around for a number of years as FreeBSD since the various conflicts with AT&T over their right to use UNIX source code. It had a mature system for dealing with those things even before OSX integrated it into their system. Apple further makes things easier by using what are essentially fat packages where very little is done that passes out of the package and into the rest of the computer without the user requesting it.
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You can do that with the text files that other OSes use without much effort. Tripwire in particular can also check the binaries as well while you're at it.
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