Yea the storage format isn't the problem (MS has its own tech like LocalDB or some variant of SQL server that could be used).
The problem has always been that the data is shared system wide, even if it doesn't need to be. That and there is no easy way to clean up the registry if uninstalled programs did not do so properly.
> The problem has always been that the data is shared system wide, even if it doesn't need to be.
If you do have a use case where that matters, you can create a new user and apply permissions you want at a single key level. Available since windows 8 (or maybe before?)
I agree, that's more of the issue. But how would you solve it? What is 'uninstalling'? Via what mechanism? Should 'rm -rf program/' clean up the registry? How?
The uninstalling procedure should clean the registry. "Uninstalling" is whatever the OS standardize as the correct procedure, Windows has one already, but it's reminiscent of the way people did packages by the time Linux software was distributed in tgz archives.
Android is way more tightly controlled, uninstalling an applications scoped data is just removing a directory.
In Windows it's up to the app to clean up. It's not as great as *nix, but nobody is saying it was. Apt and friends just do the cleanup for the app, in a standardized way. If they miss something it's still there.
The problem has always been that the data is shared system wide, even if it doesn't need to be. That and there is no easy way to clean up the registry if uninstalled programs did not do so properly.