A centralized location for GNOME config has always been present since GNOME 2 (maybe earlier, but 2 was when I started with GNOME). See, for example, this page https://www.linuxtopia.org/online_books/linux_desktop_guides...

dconf is now a binary format though.

I think gconf and macOS's plist have proven that Microsoft is at least somewhat right with registry, or at least the idea is. I don't know why people didn't like it and honestly I don't have a strong opinion on it, but I have a feeling in some ways Microsoft didn't have much of choice given that they need to have backwards compatibility.

it's handy for config, sure. but it has several downsides. very opaque compared to a config file.. keys can't have comments. the average user has no idea what a "dword" is. some registry paths are obscenely long. you can accidentally break one program or windows trying to edit another's settings. and i'm not sure currently, but a big problem in the past was uninstallers didn't remove registry keys reliably.

personally, i think XDG_CONFIG_HOME + a robust config file framework with a standardized format (yaml/toml, whatever) would work as well. being able to specify a schema could be extremely useful, too, to prevent borked configs. as you've said, we've seen a lot of tools/OS's go this direction. and it doesn't have to be perfect, the 80% case would be a huge improvement.

i'm also sure the registry made a lot of sense at the time. it was probably way quicker than reading and parsing files. we didn't care so much about sandboxing/isolation and backing up. people probably had less application installed.

I was warned far more than necessary about corrupting The Holy Windows Registry Hive, I think that’s the entirety of the problem with it.

gconf is like the windows registry how? is it just because its a centralized config store? how evil is an annotated, easy to use, non archaic file that some apps put their settings into?

it must be evil because Microsoft did it. Weird that they copied everything else Windows did and people didn't mind.

There's way more evil things about Windows, like click to raise and menu bars.

Evil, huh?