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Microsoft explains the lack of Registry backups in Windows 10

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Re: Microsoft explains the lack of Registry backups in Windows 10

#91

Post by Wowfunhappy »

oblio wrote: post #90
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft is a big company and Windows is a big product. Is fully remaking the Control Panel really such a monumental task? The Control Panel isn't that deep. It's not as though Microsoft needs to create a UI for every advanced Group Policy setting. The new Settings app was introduced with Windows 8 in 2013. That means Microsoft has had six years to complete the transition.

Yes, it's monumental. Third parties could add their own pages and hook into existing pages. Read the OldNewThing blog for the insanity that is the Windows ISV ecosystem. Windows is space age tech compared to the garbage these companies pull off.

Oh, I can understand leaving a Control Panel framework in place for opening legacy menus made by third parties. What I find problematic is the Microsoft-supplied functionality. Duplicate menus for the same thing adds an extra mental burden.

Re: Microsoft explains the lack of Registry backups in Windows 10

#92

Post by Eric_WVGG »

robbyt wrote: post #81
partiallypro wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OSX does the same thing across apps and tools, with different menu styles that don't match etc.

Do you have any examples?

John Siracusa used to write about this in his old OS X reviews… Apple would do weird things like make a dark title bar for Garage Band, then a title bar with vertical "traffic" lights in iTunes that wasn't used anywhere else, then a normal looking title bar that was just a few-pixels off in margin from the stock title bar…

It's all kind of weird and silly, but nothing at all like Windows where you can suddenly jump into the Windows 2000 UI at any turn.

Re: Microsoft explains the lack of Registry backups in Windows 10

#93

Post by jimbob45 »

goodiegood wrote: post #43

This is good, right? We constantly moan on HN about those diabolical Electron apps which waste 50 MB of disk. Microsoft saved 50 MB of disk here, they are true heros. We applaud. After all, why did I pay for all that sweet SSD disk space if not to keep it free.

That is not the chief complaint of Electron apps.

Re: Microsoft explains the lack of Registry backups in Windows 10

#94

Post by bsder »

I suspect the simplest explanation is "Microsoft is tired of people being able to use really old versions so they are breaking that ability any way they can."

See the current situation of Windows 10. There are specific "checkpoint" versions and they force you really aggressively to come up to them when they get released.

Re: Microsoft explains the lack of Registry backups in Windows 10

#95

Post by zbentley »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #85
wrs wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a skin on a skin on a skin on a skin. Its always been this way. By clicking on “advanced” buttons you can easily end up with four different eras of UI on the screen, including different system fonts and different font rendering algorithms! I can tell you first-hand from trying to get some of that fixed years ago, there’s just so much STUFF in Windows that is hardly ever seen, or should only be seen by “IT profes…

Microsoft is a big company and Windows is a big product. Is fully remaking the Control Panel really such a monumental task? The Control Panel isn't that deep. It's not as though Microsoft needs to create a UI for every advanced Group Policy setting. The new Settings app was introduced with Windows 8 in 2013. That means Microsoft has had six years to complete the transition.

> The Control Panel isn't that deep.

It really, really is.

Re: Microsoft explains the lack of Registry backups in Windows 10

#96

Post by outworlder »

blablabla123 wrote: post #78
rando444 wrote: post #5

50-100MB seems like a miniscule amount of space to warrant something like this. My WinSxS folder alone is almost 10GB. If they wanted to save space, even a modest improvement in managing updates would yield space saving results orders of magnitude greater than this.

Yes but isolated registry backups make as much sense as a full backup of a modern Linux Desktop's /etc folder. Probably not much. The config's content depends a lot on the things installed and vice-versa, even more so on Windows (unless they changed something fundamentally since 7). At least on Linux and in particular Ubuntu (Desktop) installations I aim for as little manual configuration changes as possible anyways,…

If you backup etc and home, you can pretty much restore a linux machine back to working order. Yes, you might be missing packages in a brand new install, but then the extra files are harmless.

People put etc in git even: https://joeyh.name/code/etckeeper/

The registry is much more magical and it is difficult to find and remove cruft, so I suppose there's an argument against it.

Re: Microsoft explains the lack of Registry backups in Windows 10

#97

Post by hitpointdrew »

Waterluvian wrote: post #37

I just booted up a windows 10 machine earlier today for the first time in many months. It absolutely bewilders me how terribad the UI is. You have this fancy UI but if you ever click one or two options deep you end up getting these alternately styled legacy interfaces. It's so incoherent. It really makes windows 10 feel like a skin on top of windows xp. So when the article says Microsoft wants to push users into wind…

> you end up getting these alternately styled legacy interfaces.

Yeah but you can actually DO what you want to in those legacy interfaces, in the new interfaces it is "dumbed down".

Re: Microsoft explains the lack of Registry backups in Windows 10

#98

Post by hirsin »

philjohn wrote: post #63
rando444 wrote: post #5

50-100MB seems like a miniscule amount of space to warrant something like this. My WinSxS folder alone is almost 10GB. If they wanted to save space, even a modest improvement in managing updates would yield space saving results orders of magnitude greater than this.

Marginal gains. 50MB here, 100MB there ... pretty soon you're talking real storage usage.

Pretty much this. I once tried adding a new ~3 MB binary, and it was rejected on effectively these grounds. Now consider that the team making these in/out decisions has a backlog of requests just like it for larger items...

Re: Microsoft explains the lack of Registry backups in Windows 10

#99

Post by [deleted] »

Taniwha wrote: post #73
derefr wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure it is. What home user even realizes they can change the clock time any more? Consider: can you change the clock time on your phone? I've never even considered doing so, personally. Seems like it'd screw up the GPS, if it was possible. Anyone whose first computer was a smartphone isn't going to think of changing their computer's clock time. To them, the time is a network feature, not a local feature.

GPS satellite signals include their own time

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft explains the lack of Registry backups in Windows 10

#100

Post by la_barba »

outworlder wrote: post #96
blablabla123 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but isolated registry backups make as much sense as a full backup of a modern Linux Desktop's /etc folder. Probably not much. The config's content depends a lot on the things installed and vice-versa, even more so on Windows (unless they changed something fundamentally since 7). At least on Linux and in particular Ubuntu (Desktop) installations I aim for as little manual configuration changes as possible anyways,…

If you backup etc and home, you can pretty much restore a linux machine back to working order. Yes, you might be missing packages in a brand new install, but then the extra files are harmless. People put etc in git even: https://joeyh.name/code/etckeeper/ The registry is much more magical and it is difficult to find and remove cruft, so I suppose there's an argument against it.

>If you backup etc and home, you can pretty much restore a linux machine back to working order.

Hmm, I've never done this. In terms of config files, are there never any breaking changes between versions? Like ..is a v1.0 config file always guaranteed to work with v2.0 and vice versa? I guess and a related question - what is the best way to determine if an /etc/ config file isn't required?

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