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Why the Windows Registry sucks technically (2010)

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Re: Why the Windows Registry sucks technically (2010)

#331

Post by TristanBall »

marcosdumay wrote: post #136
stockerta wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What good does having a non-UNIX OS do if it insists on doing everything worse than UNIX? The bet on "everything is an object" was a honest and competent one, but unfortunately it didn't work. "Everything is a file" works better on practice. Unfortunately, that was the last real attempt on Windows to improve things. Yes, the lack of diversity in OSes is bad. But Windows doesn't fix it. (Android and iOS were the last…

In what way did it "not work"?

Unless you meant OS/2? My understanding is the original intent there was very much to make everything an object,and the UI fully composable based on that ( in the sense of being able to link things together semi-arbitrarily, like pipes, only they never got that far )

But that's based on a half remembered article from years ago, I may have that completely wrong.

Agree with the other post that PowerShell's object view of the environment is pretty nice - not always a panacea of course, but mostly highly functional and productive

Re: Why the Windows Registry sucks technically (2010)

#332

Post by nikau »

pjmlp wrote: post #306
nikau wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And at least in unix you can quickly ripgrep through the usual home and /etc/ directories looking for something, whereas searching in regedit takes forever for some reason.

The FOSS clones people use are stuck in a past before big boys UNIXes took over. https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/aix/7.1?topic=subsystem-device-c... https://docstore.mik.ua/manuals/hp-ux/en/5992-4616/ch01s01.h...

Ahh yes the big boy UNIXes that are on life support for the few remaining stragglers willing to pay massive support contracts on legacy systems.

Re: Why the Windows Registry sucks technically (2010)

#333

Post by rwmj »

pie_flavor wrote: post #326
rwmj wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How's that supposed to work if you're modifying it in an offline image from a Linux host?

With DISM.

DISM is a proprietary Windows tool, so no use at all for modifying an offline image from a Linux host.

Re: Why the Windows Registry sucks technically (2010)

#334

Post by CamperBob2 »

robomartin wrote: post #330
CamperBob2 wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question: Do you stop to read and think about what you are saying? I don't have to. I was around when the "competition" consisted of companies like Lotus, Borland, Digital Research, and WordPerfect... to say nothing of IBM and Netscape. All of which reinforce my point nicely. Microsoft succeeded because they sucked less than everybody else. Nothing more, nothing less.

Not true. It had nothing to do with sucking less or being better (whatever that means). Sometimes success is about doing enough important things well enough while your competition does less or simply gets in their own way. That was the case for IBM back then. I remember buying my first original IBM PC. The experience was definitely what one expected from the International Businesses Machines corporation. Not what tha…

They started it, failed to execute and lost prominence. Microsoft took advantage of that, and more.

So we're in violent agreement, then.

Although I was thinking of OS/2 rather than the PC itself when I cited IBM as an example, your example is valid as well. Market leadership, like control of a car, isn't usually lost but rather given up.

Re: Why the Windows Registry sucks technically (2010)

#335

Post by pianoben »

smm11 wrote: post #278
pianoben wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be more inclined to believe in just a Linux instance running Office. The NT kernel is so incredibly different from the Linux kernel, and the Windows shell takes such extensive advantage of it, that I can't even begin to imagine the compatibility layer required.

Apple supported OS 9 running 'containerized' atop what was essentially Openstep for a few years. Worst-case I could see a Windows GUI running atop a heavily-symlinked Debian, and all Office things running Web-based. Everything else that can't run native could be in obscured VMs. At some point, the NT kernel isn't going to cut it.

> At some point, the NT kernel isn't going to cut it.

If you'd like, would you please say more on this point? What leads you to believe that?

Re: Why the Windows Registry sucks technically (2010)

#336

Post by nikau »

int_19h wrote: post #312
nikau wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good to see MS practising what they preach on newly written applications: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployedge/configure-micros... > You can also use REGEDIT.exe on a target computer to view the registry settings that store group policy settings. These policy settings are located at this registry path: HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Edge.

This is a group policy, not a setting. That makes a big difference in the right context - policies are meant for things that are typically centrally managed in enterprise environments, so the ability for the admin to remotely control every setting individually is important, and requires some kind of central system registry for OS tooling to work with.

Yep, but it still sucks if you are a user trying to figure out how a setting is applied, first delve into some seemingly proprietary config db for edge, and then realise its actually configured via a registry gpo.

Re: Why the Windows Registry sucks technically (2010)

#337

Post by account42 »

dklodh wrote: post #186
ElectricalUnion wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most Linux GUI apps either litter your home folder with dotfiles, dotfolders (both disgusting) or they follow XDG Base Directory specifications and place configurations in ${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-${HOME}/.config}

Most don't even know of XDG. The reason is, there's no central documentation or route for the userland. By Linux, we understand, the kernel and to the kernel developers, that is true. So let alone the anarchy of the userland be handled by distributions and users.

https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-...

freedesktop.org is that central documentation. Sure, there are applications that don't implemente that spec but it is not for there not being any documentation but either because the maintainers of those applications don't care or because the applications are older than the spec and moving configuration is not always trivial.

Re: Why the Windows Registry sucks technically (2010)

#338

Post by lelanthran »

deelowe wrote: post #123
chasil wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is emphatically NOT true. 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.

That's being a bit pedantic innit?

Maybe in OPs opinion, using `passwd` to write to `/etc/passwd` is not the same thing as using the registry API to write to the registry?

Personally, I feel it is the same thing.

Re: Why the Windows Registry sucks technically (2010)

#339

Post by phendrenad2 »

justanorherhack wrote: post #114
phendrenad2 wrote: post #110

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.

Very dismissive take. How many billions of dollars in man hours have registry errors created with the only solution often being to reinstall windows.

But how can we know if the part that matters is real or not? How many billions of dollars due to registry-specific errors that wouldn't have happened if the app simply used a text file? That's a quantity we can't so easily come up with.

Re: Why the Windows Registry sucks technically (2010)

#340

Post by pie_flavor »

rwmj wrote: post #333
pie_flavor wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With DISM.

DISM is a proprietary Windows tool, so no use at all for modifying an offline image from a Linux host.

I'm sure it runs under Wine. But knowing that that's how you service the image means you have no reason to be using a Linux host to do it.
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