Comment Re: Here's the solution (Score 2, Insightful) 577
Operating systems like Unix, Linux, MacOS, Solaris, etc. don't have a registry,...
True, and clearly a win.
...and don't have any significant "OS Decay".
ROFLMAO. IME, the only thing more painful than maintaining a Windows system over the long term is maintaining a *nix system over the long term.
Let's consider Linux. First, you probably get to choose between a stable or a not stable version of your distro. Choose stable and you're OK as long as you don't need to run any software released in the last 3 years and you're OK with being forced to upgrade the whole OS after maybe 2 years anyway (which will quite possibly trash your entire machine to the point of not being able to boot, or at least breaking minor features like RAID arrays, assuming you actually managed to configure one of those properly in the first place after your distro's "user friendly" installer messed it up completely). Alternatively, choose unstable if you want to run more recent software but don't mind stuff breaking all the time instead of every couple of years on a schedule.
Either way, if you want anything that hasn't got into your distribution's package management system yet, you're almost invariably forced into compiling your own software and manually installing it with makefiles. Those might, if you're really lucky, also offer a make uninstall option that actually does cleanly uninstall. That might, if you're even luckier, still work six months later, as long as no-one inadvertently installed a new version of the manually compiled code over the top to "upgrade" it, or just ran make distclean without thinking leaving you with no idea what make uninstall should have done. In any case, Linux is going to enforce absolutely no system hygiene at any point in this process.
OS X is of course doing much better with a similar foundation, as anyone who has spoken the words "Apple" and "shellshock" in the same sentence over the past few days can testify. Or at least, they'll be able to testify, just as soon as they've finished wiping and reinstalling their botnetted systems, because the patch everyone else had within hours only arrived for Apple gear several days later and long after exploits were widely found in the wild.
You're absolutely right that we should be able to install many programs and uninstall them with no lingering effects. But the idea that the registry is the only thing preventing that on Windows or that *nix systems do better is crazy. The only reason *nix systems don't break more often is that the only people running them are geeks and professionals, and those kinds of people are less likely to install random junk and more willing to dive in and fix internals when stuff goes wrong.