This is kind of what I like about Windows 10; it can be a dumbed-down experience for people that don't care, but if you want, there are gradually escalating levels of configurability. Settings -> Control Panel -> fuck it, I'll edit the registry directly.

I would definitely not want to maintain this codebase, but as an end user, I'm happy.

macOS has something better: all the settings in one place.

Windows used to have something like that too, I think it was called the Control Panel.

> macOS has something better: all the settings in one place.

All twelve of them.

I know that's snark, but I just went and counted them anyway. There's at least 413 individual different settings in macOS Sierra's System Preferences, excluding Flash Player.

No, it doesn't. Preferences, but also 'defaults write ...', or just edit a plist...

Technically correct but very few people care about "defaults write". I can't remember the last time I used it, but I do use RegEdit often enough.

One place I've found it useful is for scripting the setup of a fresh machine, something like this:

https://blog.vandenbrand.org/2016/01/04/how-to-automate-your...

I agree it's likely very few people use it. It can be exactly the right tool for the job in some circumstances.

Yeah, that's a good reason to use it, and it makes sense that the tool is there. But there's a big difference between having a CLI tool for digging around when you need it, and having two separate GUI control panels with some settings in one, some in the other, and other settings in both.

Which is a thing of beauty compared to windows and linux. Fine grained control, yet all per-user file based and thus can easily be reset to factory.

And per user vs. system overrides.