4 ms·
None of the usability problems you mention have to do with the registry, so I fail to see how getting rid of it would materially improve the windows experience.
by Joeri 9y ago
None of the usability problems you mention have to do with the registry, so I fail to see how getting rid of it would materially improve the windows experience.
The core problem with windows 10 for me is and remains the crappy driver situation. Drivers on windows are far less robust than on OS X, and OS and/or driver updates create many more problems. This isn't tied to any particular windows version, but W10 suffers from it more because updates happen with much less control over the when and where, which means drivers break in more awkward moments.
An example from my own workplace is that a lot of my coworkers have had their laptop keyboard break after a W7 update. Windows reboots to update, and ctrl-alt-del no longer works, not on the built-in keyboard and not on an external one, so you're locked out. The solution is connecting via remote desktop and logging in once, after which windows update picks back up and fixes the problem, but that's not always a convenient thing to do. I bet that microsoft doesn't even see that in their metrics, because to them it's just a remote desktop login, so they probably think those updates don't have any problems (after all, the update gets installed and people seem to go back about their business).
- thomasrognon 9y agoTo be fair, drivers are a much more difficult problem for Microsoft because they don't control the hardware like Apple does. There are way more devices out there for Windows machines, and an insane number of combinations that have to work together without ever having been tested together.
- Joeri 9y agoThat still doesn't explain why an external keyboard breaks. Keyboards are not exotic hardware, and they all work just fine when connected up to a mac.
- metaphor 9y agoIf Windows Update was able to fix the problem after being reinitialized, then your original description sounds more like a Windows Update hiccup rather than an inherent driver issue.
- digi_owl 9y agoCould be a permissions problem. These days you can authorize Windows to log you in upon reboot so that Update the finish up.
- wruza 9y agoWhy the hell changing how drivers work with every release in the first place?
- pjmlp 9y agoYou are mixing Windows with GNU/Linux. The drivers ABI has only changed a few times, instead of every point release.
- wruza 9y agoI'm not contrasting windows to anything. The fact is that with every Windows Whatever I must go to sites and download new drivers, experiencing a lot of frustration on the way, or buy a new device only to make new generation of windows kernel developers happy. "Few times" is too much.
- ethbro 9y agoRandom thought: I wonder if Microsoft has ever considered adding a built-in test suite to consumer Windows to flog drivers. I could see the benefits of being able to throw up a "Warning: {Device name} is not behaving properly and may cause system instability" prompt. As opposed to just screwing up behavior at user interaction time without a clear "That piece of hardware you bought / company you bought it from is a POS" message.
- dtech 9y agoIsn't this basically what WHQL does without the blaming? And that's enforced on 64-bit systems unless you manually turn it off. Afaik part of the WHQL process is Microsoft installing the driver on thousands of different hardware configurations and seeing if it misbehaves.
- hoodoof 9y agoI didn't say that the problems are because of the registry. I just hate the registry because it's a really bad, unusable way to configure the systems and turns into a mess and tightly binds everything together when it should all be loosely coupled. The INI file was a much better solution for configuring things.
- tonyedgecombe 9y agoIni files are awful, no fine grained control over permissions, spread all over the place, every one looks different. I'll take the registry any day.
- willtim 9y agoActually INI files are usually in a predictable place. It is registry entries that are spread all over the registry and are not cleaned-up when an application is uninstalled.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]