Exactly this.

Unix is a bit of a mess, at least that's understandable because it's 'open'.

MS registry is a bit nutty, it should be refactored in some simple, clean way, which is apparently extremely difficult to do for big companies, especially those that consider 'backwards compatibility' to be 'everything'.

> especially those that consider 'backwards compatibility' to be 'everything'.

Thank god there are companies that still think about backwards compatibility and are not intent in breaking everything because there's a shiny new thing ... ahem ... "refactoring in some simple clean way"

Making things clear is not some kind of 'shiny new thing' that the kids are dancing to - it's rational.

'Backwards Focus Absolutism' means we live in a world of stupid cobwebs and terrible design. The Windows Registry is a hack, it was originally designed to do something mundane and simple. It just grew, like a virus.

> 'Backwards Focus Absolutism' means we live in a world of stupid cobwebs and terrible design

It also means that until ~Windows 7/10 you could run even win3.1-era apps. And you didn't run into situations like "any 32-bit apps no longer work" or "any apps not updated in more than a year will be removed" as we've seen with Apple.

Do you happen to know Linus' "first rule of kernel development"?

"If a change results in user programs breaking, it's a bug in the kernel. We never EVER blame the user programs. How hard can this be to understand?" - from his famous rant [1]

So Linux prioritizes backwards compat as well. It would be insane for any project relied on by half the computing world not to. MS just throwing out their registry and rewriting it would probably break a million programs and possibly break literal billions of people's computers in some way. Its a universal problem - the more dependants any piece of code has, the harder it is to change.

[1] https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/75

"It would be insane for any project relied on by half the computing world not to."

I think this is insane and narrow minded.

I suggest there should be 'eras' of version where things do change.

If they make OS changes, notify early, prepare basic materials, create 'auto-updaters' and allow a few years for change.

But it needs to be done.

Which is a reason no one has deep knowledge about all the ioctl variants out there on Linux, as new ones get introduced, sometimes to work around backwards compatibility guarantees.

And at least in unix you can quickly ripgrep through the usual home and /etc/ directories looking for something, whereas searching in regedit takes forever for some reason.

The FOSS clones people use are stuck in a past before big boys UNIXes took over.

https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/aix/7.1?topic=subsystem-device-c...

https://docstore.mik.ua/manuals/hp-ux/en/5992-4616/ch01s01.h...

Ahh yes the big boy UNIXes that are on life support for the few remaining stragglers willing to pay massive support contracts on legacy systems.

You missed the "closed" UNIXes on my comment.