"If anything will drive people to Linux, it will be this Registry-centric architecture of Windows."<p>Wait... what?<p>This whole article is laying things on a bit thick, but this quote is especially hard to swallow.<p>The two groups of people that primarily buy Windows are individual consumers, like my dad, and corporate IT decision makers, like my boss.<p>I can't imagine either man saying to me, "I'd love to stay with Windows but its damn Registry-centric architecture is something I just can't get past. It's sure making Linux look pretty attractive."<p>There are plenty of legit reasons for choosing or not choosing to use Windows. I have a hard time swallowing that its Registry-centric architecture is high on most people's lists.
"Microsoft has a problem—the whole industry has a problem. Everyone needs Windows 7 to be a huge success. In the past week, even Intel has been bemoaning the fact that nobody is upgrading machines like they used to."<p>I really don't think this has anything to do with Windows 7 specifically. What's happening is that PCs have reached the point where even a machine that's a few years old running Win2003 is entirely adequate to do the things most people and businesses want a PC to do: run Office, read email, watch YouTube, surf the net.<p>The value-added argument is just no longer convincing for many consumers, especially in this economy.
I clicked the link because I was interested in the topic. Then I saw Dvorak wrote it and I had to close it with extreme prejudice. Dvorak is one of those writers that I consider hostile to intelligent discourse. He is a master troll who knows how to get page views by making people who understand the things he's talking about waste thousands of man hours formulating pointless rebuttals. If he could be banned from Hacker News it would be in everyone's best interest.
Backwards comparability? Windows is a platform. If Microsoft revamped the whole thing, it would turn into a whole new platform.<p>And as a side note, Gnome has gconf. That's an awful lot like the registry, just with XML and directories.
"At some point, maybe soon, the Registry will be the death of Windows. At some point people will simply refuse to go through this sort of upgrade process to accommodate what is essentially a mediocre architecture based on ideas from the 1980s."<p>If I remember correctly, the story of how the Registry was invented (for the first version Windows NT) was told in the book Show Stopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft by G. Pascal Zachary. The rationale for the registry didn't inspire confidence (in me) at that time, and now the registry seems to be an idea whose time has passed.
Imho he doesn't make a lot of sense. First, he is claiming that Windows 7 breaks more backward compatibility than previous Windowses. I find it very hard to believe that Vista->7 upgrade would break more applications than XP->Vista, especially at the time when Vista was released.<p>Secondly, he is saying that registry hinders portability of applications. Well, that's kinda true, but on the next paragraph he is already promoting Linux-based systems as alternative.<p>Just try to install an application on usual Linux OS and then move it to another system, with all configuration data. Just for extra fun, install it originally with classic configure-make-make install-method, lose the source tree and move it another distro (or different version of same distro).<p>Registry may not be perfect, but it isn't that bad either. Worst part is that many applications abuse it a lot, causing all kinds of problems, but would flat configuration files really solve the problem of misbehaving apps?<p>If registry would be bit more organized, and had some inline documentation it actually would be much better.
There is still a registry, because the registry is still a great idea.<p>Dvorak argues that the registry is 'a pile of junk clogging up the machine'. The registry is a tree data structure - more nodes won't 'clog it up', it'll still take the same number of operations to get anywhere in the tree
It sounds like the author of the article is pining for NeXT/OSX App bundles, though he doesn't seem to know they exist. Anyway:<p>The Registry in windows was a /proc-alike database for twiddling system and driver settings, except slightly smarter in that it was automatically persisted to disk. Application-writers hijacked it to store their own applications' settings. At this point, if HKLM/Software and HKCU/Software were just transparently transformed into configuration files stored in the user's Profile folder, I don't think any harm would be done. The rest of the registry, though, is actually centralized by necessity (though you could argue that nodes for the kernel and the shell should probably live in separate hives.)
Wow. I always knew Dvorak was insane but this is insane++. I don't even know what he is talking about:<p>1) Is he talking about the upgrade path from XP to Windows 7?<p>2) Does he know that there is an upgrade path from Vista to Windows 7?<p>3) Does he know that all three versions use the registry so it clearly has no impact on upgrade paths?<p>4) Is he advocating that microsoft make smaller changes in order to provide an upgrade path to older versions or is he advocating they make bigger, breaking changes like getting rid of the registry?<p>5) Is somebody checking his pill box to see if he took his medicine? Because I am sincerely worried for his health.
I've been using the RTM and so far I plan on installing XP on my newish notebook that came with Vista. My biggest issue with Vista is the way it keeps pinging the hard drive:<p><a href="http://forums.techarena.in/windows-vista-performance/974285.htm" rel="nofollow">http://forums.techarena.in/windows-vista-performance/974285....</a><p>I could never get it to stop completely and it runs down the battery and causes extra noise and heat. And its the same thing with Windows 7.<p>I'm going to pay $140 for a XP 64bit license. I would love to downgrade but MS doesn't offer that for Vista Home.
The idea that Microsoft could remove the registry without breaking millions of applications is a pipe dream. Say what you will about Microsoft's love of backwards compatibility, but they'd lose customers if half of your applications broke with Windows 7.