Why do you care about the registry and NTFS?

Desktop developer could care, but a web one?

I've opened up Regedit in the past year, but I work with a piece of benighted software that supports a weird but useful feature designed fifteen years ago when doing unfathomable things with the registry was something people did.

I'd argue that's preferable to a complicated hierarchy of obscurely named keys.

Also, the registry is used for a lot of stuff besides configs. So my experience on Windows is that you have to run the installers (=slow), rather than simply copying all the files to clone a system.

Plus, it tends to fragment all across the disk, or something like that, and your Windows system inevitably slows down over time. Maybe SSDs eliminate that problem; I (fortunately) haven't had to use Windows in quite a few years.

You can't copy full software installs like that, but it's not the fault of the registry. Installing typical software means affecting dozens of system settings all in different places. You can't easily copy linux software along with every setting it affects either. You're best off either reinstalling or copying the entire drive, both of which work on Windows.

No, that's not true--I did once in 2015 to make a game written in 1998 work.

I think we can lay this one to rest.

Copying putty settings from one host to another? That's a regedit.

(Semi-) permanently disabling live scans from Windows Defender? That's a regedit.

https://github.com/randyrants/sharpkeys

One of the first things I install on any new system. Gotta have my Caps Lock->Escape.