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Comment by Chinjut | Hacker News Reader

Don't MacOS and Unixes have the equivalent of registry hell with a million configuration files hidden away in /etc/ or /usr/ or wherever, and then having to check where environment variables are set and so on? Ideally, almost all of a program's configuration settings would be stored in the same folder as the program, readily discoverable, and you could just pick these things up and move them easily, but in practice, it seems to be a pain everywhere.

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The registry is uniquely crap because it puts all the configuration for everything into some single store - I don't know what devilish format lies beneath it, then it stores everything as binary keys. Things are not separated strictly by application so you end up with a giant pile of intermingled goo.

In Linux, no doubt there's alot to get your head around, but I've never found things to be a giant pile of spaghetti. The challenge Linux has is there's a bajillion ways to do things so you have to be pretty experienced to feel confident crawling around the tunnels and ventilation ducts.

The disfigured nature of the registry is a real shame, I actually like the idea of centralizing all configuration in Windows. I wonder if there was a better solution in Cairo.

To be honest (and I'm aware that I might be tarred and feathered for this) I kinda prefer the centralized Windows registry to the "random assortment of config files" approach that Linux has. I think both Windows and Linux give you that feeling of carefully crawling around in ventilation ducts once you get your hands dirty; I doubt it's possible to get rid of that without getting rid of the inherent flexibility that the systems provide. There's a reason Windows has both the registry and the Settings app.

NixOS and Guix come close to this with a central spot for declaring the entire system state, including program configuration and env vars. Now there is still the $HOME/.config mess, which home-manager[0] tries to tackle.

[0] https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager

From a typical user’s perspective, macOS puts all Preferences files into ~<username>/Library/Application Support/<app bundle name> or ~<username>/Library/Preferences/<app bundle name>, and they are standard Plist files readable by both command line and GUI tools that ship with the system, so easily editable and human-readable. From a power-user’s perspective, it is a Unix system and that part of it is the usual mess of Unix config files. I’m definitely a power user but rarely have any need to touch a Unix config file on my macOS systems.

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