I hope so. Too little actual details about Win10 are available.

Too much stupid posts from 'DRM free supporters' in this thread I can't even say anything for them.

I raise you an eyebrow and call for an elaboration.

I'll start with by pointing a finger to post 26 and 36.

Well, if we play that card... as a Software Engineer and a master of science in Information Systems, I can confirm that the usual "problems" that the Registry has are not caused by itself or the operating system, but by developers incapable of properly doing their job.

You would have the same problem if you use config files and a developer tries to be smart and deletes or somehow corrupts your config files.
What would be a more appropriate solution then? You have the Registry on one side, which according to you is somehow bad, even though all problems related to it are happening because bad developers are terrible at their job, and config / text / XML files on the other side that can easily be manipulated to hell and back and deleted and corrupted and suffer everything that a .txt file can suffer.

Which poison would you pick, one that is smartly managed by the OS itself and relies on very specific instructions to be modified, or one that is spread all over the place and can be destroyed by a 2 year old kid?

That's fine. It would take either malicious intent or a massive amount of developer incompetence for a program with it's own local configuration to step out of bounds and muck about with other programs or the operating systems own configuration.

When everything is bundled together in the registry, however, everything is at risk from developer incompetence, not just the developers own program(s). I'll take text/xml files.

Windows already hides %appdata% by default, and you can't muck about things in the Program Files folders without administrator access... which should be off by default, though I know the last reinstall of Windows 7 I did it was enabled by default. *shakes head* Given a proper permissions setup there shouldn't be any worry of some random 2 year old wiping things out, unless you foolishly gave them admin rights.

As I've said before, Linux and OS X, hell even DOS have been doing it for ... ever, pretty much, and they've proven to be far less likely to be brought down by a single program's incompetent developer. So yeah, I'll take the text files, thank you very much.

No. No no no no no. UAC should be on be default, and should be left on, especially if you know what you are doing. Turning UAC off is similar to running everything as root on Linux, and if you suggest that to anyone using Linux, you will at best be laughed at.
Do not turn UAC off, or a simple "echo y | del c:\*.* /s /f" will be enough to make you cry, and no antivirus can stop that.

And while programs may need to modify the Program Files directory when installing, they shouldn't need to do so when running. That's what the user directory is for (or home if you prefer that terminology).


As for proper permissions setup, it is there. When you have a single administrator user on Windows, there are actually 2 users. One is the "Administrator" user, which has full access, the other is the user you created, who doesn't have full access. UAC is just a "Run as" command for the built-in administrator account. But you are free to make any kind of permissions setup you want, and it does have more flexibility than the rwx system. I don't recall being able to allow write for all members of a group (GOG Staff for example) other than a specific user (Judas) on Linux, though it may be there.

When did I suggest turning off UAC? It is. There are 3 parts to the permissions in *nix systems: User, Group and World/Everyone. Each part consists of Read/Write/eXecute permissions and any combinations thereof. So you can give the specific User rwx, the Group that owns the file/folder can also be given rwx which in turn gives all users in that group the permissions, and you can even open it up to anyone with access to the computer having rwx.

Numerically the Read bit is 4, Write is 2 and eXecute is 1, so a hypothetical file with the permissions 754 gives the specific user rwx, the group gets r-x, and the world gets r--

Ah, apologies, misinterpreted the quote. You used ... and then said "which should be off by default" and you meant administrative access, I assumed you meant the "can't muck about things in Program Files".

So, if you meant that being unable to muck things in Program Files is a good thing, and that it should be on by default, apologies. If you meant that being able to muck things in Program Files should be on by default, then my previous post still stands.

Ah, yes I meant that you shouldn't be able to muck about in program files by default. What I was referring to was the user account created during setup was given admin rights, which should be off by default.

So, you want to deal with INI files, TXT files, XML files, some proprietary encoded files, and all other random bunch of crap instead of having one standard way of doing things?

Because logic, right?

This argument has been already presented and I have answered it adequately, I believe(bar the Software Engineer and Master of Science information systems, of course). To summarize it, in case you do not feel like seeking it, the registry would have been useful and correctly implemented if it prevented bad programming from causing System Instability. If a developer uses config files and does stupid things, the system stays stable. Only his application suffers. And this is the point in the whole argument.
The Registry is "bad" not as a concept but as an implementation. Getting rid of completely unreadable and unsearchable UIDs, establishing safety and stability of the system against poor programing and breaking it to several files(thus, my opinion about a dedicated directory being a better implementation), are some of the solutions I can think of. I am not anti-Microsoft as a "philosophy". Microsoft has done a lot of things right. I already used the Direct X implementation as an example on how to do things right concerning system stability and safeguarding against poor programming. But the team that created the Registry implementation could had done much better because, as it is, it hurts more than it helps. Admittedly, there have been attempts to fix some things across Windows' versions but they did not touch the core design, where the problems reside, in my opinion.

Also, if someone wants, can very easily destroy the registry. After all, they are only files on the drive. They can suffer exactly what every other file can suffer and are harder to recover than .txt files, for certain.

Text files, yes. INI, XML, CFG, TXT, doesn't much matter, it's all plain text. And it's still one standard way of doing things: open text file in text file editor of choice, change settings, save and exit.

What program uses proprietary encoded files for their configuration? I've never seen one. And I can't imagine why anyone would ever do it when the standard, for decades, has been plain text files. What possible benefit could it provide to either the end user or the developer?

I have a feeling Windows 10 is going to usher a time of chaos in the overall game market for older games.

This Windows 10 sounds like a bad idea.

Only silver lining is that Windows 7 support is confirmed until 2020. By then we will all be half computer/ half human so it won't matter much.

Please enlighten us weaklings.