In this case, I’d say it’s less about how the registry works, and more about how deliberately obnoxious Microsoft makes the experience for the sake of their agenda.
Sure if you have to deal with the registry at all, it’s “hard” but that’s casting stones from a glass house as dconf can be just as hard, and then you have the odd occasion where someone suggests dbus-send, which certainly doesn’t have room to mock registry handling as hard. The point is that most people never have to touch dconf/dbus directly to do what they want, and in Microsoft some things are deliberately obscure due to user hostile intentions.
For the “don’t care” computer user? absolutely. Given that the key doesn’t exist at all by default, means it’s not discoverable even for someone that might think to randomly peruse the registry hierarchy. Even if you know it, it’s a typically tedious registry path. Based on Microsoft’s track record, the fact you know the registry key today doesn’t mean that key won’t change behaviors or move somewhere else randomly, or start having to be paired with some other registry key.
Contrast with Plasma, where the same capability is possible, and I just right clicked the button to check out settings and could easily figure out without help or internet search how to enable/disable internet results in the search. Further when I enabled it, the non-internet search stayed blazing fast. Then disabled it again because, well, why would I want that. I did however add browser tab search since I bothered to look because that is handy, just removed history and web search.
In this case, I’d say it’s less about how the registry works, and more about how deliberately obnoxious Microsoft makes the experience for the sake of their agenda.
Sure if you have to deal with the registry at all, it’s “hard” but that’s casting stones from a glass house as dconf can be just as hard, and then you have the odd occasion where someone suggests dbus-send, which certainly doesn’t have room to mock registry handling as hard. The point is that most people never have to touch dconf/dbus directly to do what they want, and in Microsoft some things are deliberately obscure due to user hostile intentions.
Deliberately obnoxious that can be disabled by a single registry edit?
A single registry edit to a key that doesn’t exist because they wanted to obscure that it was possible.
For the “don’t care” computer user? absolutely. Given that the key doesn’t exist at all by default, means it’s not discoverable even for someone that might think to randomly peruse the registry hierarchy. Even if you know it, it’s a typically tedious registry path. Based on Microsoft’s track record, the fact you know the registry key today doesn’t mean that key won’t change behaviors or move somewhere else randomly, or start having to be paired with some other registry key.
Contrast with Plasma, where the same capability is possible, and I just right clicked the button to check out settings and could easily figure out without help or internet search how to enable/disable internet results in the search. Further when I enabled it, the non-internet search stayed blazing fast. Then disabled it again because, well, why would I want that. I did however add browser tab search since I bothered to look because that is handy, just removed history and web search.