The registry's implementation is bad, sure. However, a global key/value store is extremely useful. I changed the default background color in Windows from 'White' to 'Light Gray,' and it works for almost every application I use. Visual Studio, Explorer, even some webpages! For years, I turned the brightness of my monitor down, but that severely hinders readability of some color schemes.

How would global shared settings look without a registry? Like Unix configuration files. This is a step backwards, as there is no unified way to read Unix configurations. Some things are stored in environment variables, some things are stored in XML files, some things are represented as special files, and some things are stored in INI-style files. Something like window color would be handled by the display manager, but other configuration settings would need to be hunted down at runtime.

What's really better, "read system.window.background.default_color.[rgb] as ints," or "parse /etc/x/conf/x.conf as an .ini file, look for the variable background_color. It is stored in the format (r,g,b). If it is not present, the default is (255,255,255)."?