A library could fix most of thar. Layered settings are nice, but nothing you can't do with files, and a well defined file structure(/etc/app/myapp, /etc/policy

A library could fix most of thar. Layered settings are nice, but nothing you can't do with files, and a well defined file structure(/etc/app/myapp, /etc/policy/myapp, .config/app/myapp, etc) GUIs are great, but nothing you can't do with a settings.ini.uidefinition file(Or better yet, settings.d/uidefinition.json), and an editor. The registry GUI is currently not really much better than a text file , modern settings GUIs are context sensitive wizards with live changes and all kinds of stuff. More strong types could possibly improve that, if GUIs supported all of them, but you probably couldn't cover everything or fully compete with in-app settings. Maybe with some kind of embedded HTML/JS form definition for every hive. Linux does have dconf, which seems to solve most registry use cases.