You can do similar on windows. However, the registry was turned into trying to solve a slightly different issue of roaming users, and centrally managed settings, split by machine and user, and using what became active directory. They started off with OLE and its central store of holding name value pairs in a tree. Basically making the registry do at least 4 different things. Only one of them it does 'ok' (COM/OLE lookups). In practice it became a huge mess because thousands of applications now keep their settings in there and poor cleanup practices like you see. When like 99% of the use cases out there would be perfectly well suited to just using the forever deprecated win32 INI API to manage settings and MS just saying 'put your config files in these places for different effects'. Instead they said 'put it all in the registry'. Looking back at it, it is now 100% clear it was a bad design decision.