[mhink]

> Windows and macOS dominate because 99.9% of users do not care about the difference between registries, file systems, text or binary tools, UNIX-like, POSIX, etc… none of these things matter to them! They just want to use a computer and get on with their life.

The flip side of this argument is that the experience of using computers for that 99.9% of users sucks.

As software engineers, it's almost our responsibility to argue in favor of better platforms, because every day not spent fighting the platform is a day we could be building better experiences for our users. (Not to mention, every day the platform doesn't inadvertently mess up the user experience is a day of smaller support costs.)

[pie_flavor]

The registry does not impact those users' experience. Needing to learn how to use a shell, does.

[yndoendo]

I would disagree that it does impact users' experience because when the registry gets corrupt you have to start by installing Windows from scratch. Nothing like Windows 10 update disabling registry backups to save space on low capacity storage and finding out after the fact when attempting to recover Windows 10.

Secondly with device drivers being tied to the registry there is not a simple system upgrade of taking out the hard drive and placing it into a new computer.

Just not everyday occurrences for most but still exist.

[ajolly]

Windows these days works extremely well with just taking out the hard drive and placing it into a different computer, even across different processor brands completely different hardware etc.

I personally do this all the time. At most you get an extra restart the first time the drive is in a new set of hardware and after that you're good to go.

My main Windows install is probably 8 years old at this point, it's gone between multiple motherboards.

The biggest annoyance is a few pieces of software that tie activation to the motherboard.

If you want to make it even more portable you can install Windows to a vmdk.

And if you want to get a special complicated, you can have that vmdk act as essentially a secondary variant of your main operating system complete with symlinking most of the files and application info, to both save space and so you have most of the same state across both os's, but still can play around and easily roll back any changes.

[pie_flavor]

The registry does not get corrupt. This is not a thing that happens without the system files themselves being corrupted. People blame any old problem on the registry the way they blame any old problem on /etc. Nor, in the case of an actual registry problem, do you have to reinstall Windows from scratch; restoring the registry from backup is the entire point of system restore points, which are created on every update and most program installs. As a bonus, yes, I did upgrade my computer that way. This stuff is pure superstition.

[dmitriid]

I've reinstalled Linux due to borked sound on update way more times than I reinstalled Windows due to corrupt registry.

And cumulatively I spent significantly less time on Linux than I did on Windows.