The Windows Registry is a dump on disk of some half-assed structures defined in a memory heap, poorly specified, being in essence a file-system as well. Also, only individual operations have been atomic and one update in the Windows Registry does not equal one update of an entire configuration file on Linux. Transactional support has been added, but late and interactions with it are still problematic. The Internet is filled with complaints and pieces of advice on corrupted registries.

And it is being obsoleted, with the elephant in the room being that the Windows Registry needs to be thread-safe because it's a central store of all settings and this was a really bad idea. I'll also have my nginx.conf over a registry entries file any day of the week.