In theory it is a great concept. "lets put all the configuration in one place" in reality it ends up being super annoying, It is hard to say why, but after a bi

In theory it is a great concept. "lets put all the configuration in one place" in reality it ends up being super annoying, It is hard to say why, but after a bit of thought I think my main objection to the registry is that it is yet another tree but this one is out of band. windows is already bad about this, what with the drive letters, and the way the shell(explorer) tries to present it's own magical imaginary view of the filesystem. the registry just takes that and dials it to 11, now you have a special tree, that needs it's own specific tools to use. I think one of the key innovations of unix was the unix filesystem and the way it made everything one tree, one unified interface for everything is an amazing concept, In fact I think that the real innovation of unix was it's simplicity. now later this was messed up (yeah berkeley, I am putting most of the blame for that on you) with sockets, sysctl, etc. Or in short every unix interface that ignores the one true API, the filesystem(which is for the most part open, read write, seek, close) In conclusion, whenever I see a tree but whoever made it decided that no, we are a special snowflake, and are not going to attach this tree to the main tree of data on your system(the filesystem) it bugs me. The rogues gallery here include gnome config, sysctl, dbus, and yes the windows registry.