111–120 of 342 posts
Plus, it's inscrutable and malware developers seem to know it better than legit developers do.
Windows 10 and 11 have moved away from the registry for applications. It's in C:\Users\ \AppData\Local\ for per-user information I haven't had to go into the registry on Windows 10 or 11 except for enabling beta/early access features.
I don't understand how people figure out what registry entries to make out of the ether for certain changes. I don't know why most programs have an in-program settings menu, an external settings.json or something similar, and then registry entries to configure similar things. I don't know why Windows has almost 0 policing about programs editing the registry. If you uninstall a program, why is it so hard to remove all…
How can MS claim to hire 'the best of the best' when such a commonly interfaced piece of their product is garbabe?
Why isn't it refactored to be clear, concise, with simple documentation and tutorials?
If we were to be cynical we could say 'they don't want you to because competitive this-or-that' - ok, money would be a reason. But it's not that. It's just a turd.
Mac is a bit similar, in that it's hard to find what goes where and why, with all of the examples.
The entire development world before mobile I think had this anti-product attitude: they don't give a s**. You're 'stupid' for not having it figured out. The 'documentation is there!' (but really only in some obscure way). People move on, nobody cares. Who in MS has the job to 'care' about such a thing anyhow?
These kinds of things drive me bananas. These are the biggest and richest corporations to ever exist. It should be clear, documented, with tutorials, examples and searchable.
And yet the registry is used by billions of people, everyday, without issue. So the technical problems must be minor in practice, right? This is all very academic.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The UNIX way is undeniably more flexible since it isn't a virtual filesystem, it is just a filesystem. Unix simply doesn't have a "way" in that regard, other than a loose convention to put text files in "/etc". Every application comes up with its own format. Parsing that file is application-specific. Updating a value in a text file means re-writing the whole file again. It is a technically-inferior approach that ha…
To be fair, Microsoft doesn't rely on the registry for complex configurations either, even IIS uses .config files.
Except that is for serving from a single file share ir a replicated site across a farm of IISes.
This has nothing with 'complex configurations'
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I can’t and shouldn’t be able to write to /etc as an ordinary or guest user. Er-readying values isn’t done usually with apps. You can get corrupted files if two instances fight for the same file. If that’s your thing, please use mongo. Also, please provide support to all the users. Lastly, if you messed up certain configuration or data files, your system won’t boot either on ANY system. Sounds like you’re just one of…
> I can’t and shouldn’t be able to write to /etc as an ordinary or guest user. You're right, you shouldn't. If you are able to, your distro is very odd and I'd recommend seeking a new one. > Sounds like you’re just one of many anti-windows people, exactly what was pointed out about people bashing the registry. There's no need to attack people.
If you absolutely could not write to /etc, then you would never be able to change your password.
The passwd, chsh, chfn, and other utilities allow a non-privileged user to make controlled changes to privileged files via the setuid/gid system calls.
A user can trigger controlled writes to files in /etc.
I really appreciate when people use technical facts to criticize something, like with this. It is a well written take-down of the implementation of the Windows Registry as of both today and 2010. I suspect if the concept of the registry was created today it would look more like a database (e.g. Sqlite), although organizing it like a virtual FileSystem does have a certain appeal, and unfortunately I don't know of a da…
> The UNIX way is undeniably more flexible since it isn't a virtual filesystem, it is just a filesystem. Unix simply doesn't have a "way" in that regard, other than a loose convention to put text files in "/etc". Every application comes up with its own format. Parsing that file is application-specific. Updating a value in a text file means re-writing the whole file again. It is a technically-inferior approach that ha…
Yes. Nothing standardized in this area in UNIX/linux-land. We do have FHS, some xdg specifications and the series of configurations options that were born with dconf which resemble windows registry a bit.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The UNIX way is undeniably more flexible since it isn't a virtual filesystem, it is just a filesystem. Unix simply doesn't have a "way" in that regard, other than a loose convention to put text files in "/etc". Every application comes up with its own format. Parsing that file is application-specific. Updating a value in a text file means re-writing the whole file again. It is a technically-inferior approach that ha…
I hate this fanatical love of the UNIX way. I really hate that as of today Windows is the only non UNIX OS. I trully believe that this fact set us back. No more exciting new OSes only boring unix.
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Point about /etc is that it’s just one part of “configuration”. There’s no /etc for users. That’s why we get all these dot.dirs. At least some apps use ~/.config/
.config/ and .local/ are the de facto /etc for users, but there is the set of XDG_ environment variables that are intended to fill that role.
It is easy to be critical of Microsoft and many of their decisions until you reflect on the reality that they have provided the software that has been running billions of computers world-wide for almost four decades. And they have done this with an astounding level of software and hardware compatibility across time, devices and technologies. This is critical to understand before pointing at anything MS and being crit…
And then imagine that most of your original decisions were poor ones, you won your position by virtue of being an abusive monopoly, and as a result, the majority of the desktop world has been needlessly suffering under the burden of your poor technical decisions for 40 years.