It is more on the contrary. The registry is one of the most well-thought features of Windows.

Also there is nothing like "bloat". No process needs too loop around or smth like that, so there is literally no way to have a forgotten registry item slowing down your PC.

And last but not least: What are the alternatives? .plist config files like with Apple, scattering around the system?

If I remember correctly there was an internal effort at Microsoft to scrap the registry (Longhorn?) but they decided not to, and probably because a registry is actually a good idea and necessary to get something performant (compared to ini files).

The critique against the Windows registry stems from the Windows 95 days when the registry could become corrupt and repair or reinstall was necessary. However since then the registry works like a database, it has transaction logs and simultaneous writes are atomic. Registry is also strongly typed, not a bunch of strings. Registry can easily be backed up and restored.

Probably because Longhorn tried to replace even more parts of Windows with a database-like system, and they'd have rolled the registry-equivalent into that, if it had succeeded.

> It’s bloat directly impacts the speed of the operating system.

Do you have any evidence of this? I remember in the XP days the German c't computer magazine tested populating the registry with hundreds MBs of garbage and found no performance impact at all.

How is it worse than having config files scattered around in distro-specific locations?

And how is it worse than dconf? People hated on dconf during the transition to systemd, but it is here now.

I do not really think one is better than the other.

dconf has a nice schema that you can see with the editor

As other comments point out, there is nothing wrong with the registry itself. On the other hand the editor (regedt) is terrible.

If you drop something, then you need some kind of replacement for that.

I don't see any alternative on where entire OS could be configured other than registry.

KDE and all its applications and a majority of other Linux desktop application use the configuration laid out in <https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/>.