Every single interaction with post-Windows 7 configuration / settings leaves me very frustrated. Some settings have new UIs, some don’t, often there are several generations of UIs for the same group of settings. Add to that minor revisions of the UI that happen as part of software updates. Finally, hardware vendors often have their own apps, various “Ninja Dragon Sci-fi Anime Nuclear Power Plant Control Centers” from graphic card vendors and some random sys-tray crap for your webcam and touchpad.
I have no idea why things turned out this way, and I remember how with every other major OS release Microsoft promises a brand new rewrite, and yet if you dig deep enough you probably can find some UI from Win3.1 era.
My most frustrated moment was discovering that windows 11 requires a network connection to set it up. It blocks on the user creation screen until you decide to add a microsoft account or create a new one. There's no other OS I know of that does the same thing.
If I recall correctly, you have to press a secret keyboard shortcut (to open command prompt) and run a command to unlock the "no Internet and thus no Microsoft account" version of the Windows 11 setup.
"Services" and "Disk Management" UI's are great examples of ollllld (possibly MFC?) Windows UI's and are still the standard way to manage those settings from what I can tell.
You can use Spy++ to look at the properties of open windows on your system. If the window class name starts with "afx:" then the application uses MFC. As far as I can recall I've never seen a Microsoft product built on either MFC or Visual Basic. They apparently don't like their own dog food.
They tried doing stuff in .Net for Vista but had to revert all that; perhaps they've now come back to using it for real, but I know the new settings panel is done in C/C++.
What's funny is I remember when those Microsoft Management Console snap-in tools were brand new, and what came before them was a lot less nice to use.
(They might be MFC. Windows 2000 is about the right time for Microsoft to be C++ happy enough to push developers to use it over just using the bare Win32 C APIs. MMC was a pretty big deal when it first came out.)
Microsoft has a similar surface design trend as Apple, both want to constantly streamline and dumb down the main parts of the OS so that no one could possibly be confused since there’s so little you can even do.
But interestingly while Apple keeps some of the complexity hidden deep in ridiculous new squirrel holes in the settings UI (things like ( i ) circles), Microsoft just accommodates those who would miss the greater detail by also shipping the previous version’s entire settings screens wholesale under an “advanced” or “more” button from the new UI.
I am much more confused on where to find things in 10/11 than I was in Windows XP. But maybe I’m a minority because all the normies back then needed geeks like me to set up their XP PCs so maybe this is easier for them?
You don’t enjoy the modern white space heavy configuration to be split almost multiple pages? Win10, I have to scroll to see the entire sound options on a single non-exhaustive page given the comically low information density.
The new pages seem designed by someone who only knew how to build a vertical layout and just stacked all controls without a care for the user. I am also amused how the modern window takes a good second plus to paint.
My favorite part is how you can now only have a single page open in all of settings. Have a blocking dialogue box open? Too bad for you if you want to change literally anything else, gotta wait!
That's a problem with a lot of modern desktop UIs. The industry has somehow unlearned how to use multiple windows. Everything is a tablet app in a single window now.
I think you're supposed to use Recall for that now. Open the network settings, then switch to printer settings and ask the LLM what your network settings were.
It's a much more elegant solution than multiple windows in Windows!
Or how the network settings pages often don’t even have basic network information on it, so you literally can’t even use the supposed debug page to actually diagnose even the most basic network issues!
I've never found any way on the Windows 10 network page to configure, troubleshoot, or display diagnostic network information. I have to go the 'old' one that is more like what was present in Vista & 7.
What's actually mind boggling to me is that after so many years windows still uses plenty of badly formatted unresizable windows. Also no way to pin a window to top (in Z-order) even though we've had that on Linux for at least a quarter of century
I doubt the interface is any good for normal user as well.
The UX designers don't care for it to be actually usable, they just want the standard UX/UI ideas of whitespace and stuff looking good without thoughts how the features are actually used.
Indeed, and this seems to be pervasive in UI design as a whole. Until not long ago, designers created palletes of styles and components to be used by programmers. Now they draw entire screens and deliver the drawings to the programmers. This puts too much decision power in the hands of a group that don't have a clear view of the requirements and development costs -- and I have serious doubts about their understanding of "user experience" as well. Like you said, it feels that their artistic conceptions trumps anything else
This 100%. And I fear it's a full-blown problem in design ethos generally. We're looking to remodel the kitchen and three designers have presented different, very beautiful concepts... Without any practical long-term consideration to real-world usability
The one knobs and dials will probably be retained, but only in the Enterprise version and Windows Server. That's how they segment the userbase these days. Home and Pro are for dummies.
What is worst even Windows Server is not being designed for power user/ administrator.
Yeah I can do lots of stuff with powershell but lots of time I just want to run app wiz.cpl because new one doesn’t show all stuff that is installed. Let alone network settings new screens being useless.
I think all these pages are designed to work on Windows Phone. MSFT tried to have a single UI for both computers and phone. Around 2010. Ubuntu tried the same thing. With similar results. We are still stuck with Microsoft's effort.
Of course, they only know how to build a single vertical layout. They’re used to building apps or sites aimed at smartphones, which are the only devices, right?
> But... don't the control panel windows have more functionality (and usability) in practice?
Yes, and they're not alone even in the FOSS world (cough ...Gnome... cough).
My take on this is that someone decided that everything must either run on a cellphone or conform to its UI, therefore GUIs are slowly moving to the mobile touch screen model, which translates into leaving lots of unused space because of the bigger size of finger tips compared to mouse pointers that could trigger errors with smaller and more dense controls, and of course less controls because smaller screens with comparable resolution to much larger monitors would make them much harder to operate.
I can understand the reason, however all comes from the 1st mistake which is the attempt to unify everything to a mobile UI, probably to save on development time. It's unnecessary and it's wrong.
Windows 95 was built in 3 years and its user interface is still superior to anything they've come up since then - instant redraws, buttons respond to clicks, information was laid out as needed, not to look good in a theoretical sense, etc.
I remember it very differently. You could often watch interfaces be drawn line-by-line and box-by-box, with many pixels getting redrawn multiple times before it was finished. Buttons responded to clicks, as long as you waited. The information layout was good though.
I would say your comment makes more sense for Windows 2000.
Windows 98 was quite a step up in polish and performance from Windows 95, even on the same hardware. Windows 2000 was an even bigger step up in polish, but more resource hungry.
Remember that was the era of single processor PCs, if you had a really demanding CPU hog you generally had to forget about trying to multitask as the experience would be painful. If you had something like file compression happening (which could also occupy the HDD) it'd leave little for the UI redrawing, and this is also long before that aspect was accelerated
right, but you can also bring a modern system to its knees with a high enough load. the new systems suck by default. keyboard response time is much higher than ever because of the accumulation of abstraction strata.
> You could often watch interfaces be drawn line-by-line
On a CPU system fast enough to render it within a frame, you could switch that animation off. I think it was mostly there to preserve UI compatibility with potatoes.
Windows XP and Windows 7, although with a lack of consistency (compared to macOS) was great for getting things done and powerfull on even low hardware (I liked how it disable areo effects if you did not have the GPU for it).
This is a major part of why I switched to Linux! Microsoft is literally killing the desktop by turning Windows into a tablet OS! There are still many great DEs on Linux that are actually DEs!
Yes, this is the method that I have been always using. But I have had many cases where it seems to reset or bug out in some other way, and the Logitech MX Master 3S does still does not work well. There's definitely something weird about movement, it doesn't feel linear and accurate even after running this command.
The mouse feels perfect on Windows/Linux, but it's off in my Macbook. Sometimes also loses bluetooth connectivity, where it kind of starts to skip and/or stops working completely. And I have to take the bluetooth usb, put it back in for it to work normally again.
Maybe I should try another mouse, if you have any recommendations for a similar, ergonomic wireless one. Definitely don't want the magic mouse.
Ergonomically I think the Logitech one is perfect for me.
I do own a device I'm very fond of, Ploopy Mouse, but it's not likely to match your criteria. It's quite big, 3D-printed, open source, wired, and runs QMK. Loads of character :)
Well, the sales video on the page starts immediately with a person ditching the MX Master mouse, so I do feel targeted, I will continue with the video.
But why? Windows phone died. What's going to run these phone-apps-for-Windows-desktop, other than Windows desktop, where they have the ergonomics of a rubber unicycle?
I will deeply abhor the new Settings app until they go back 30 years and rediscover multitasking. It's pure insanity that I can't have two Settings windows open in different locations at the same time. Instead, if I'm doing one thing (like the volume mixer) and need to quickly check my Bluetooth devices, I have to navigate to the Bluetooth screen from the volume mixer, then I need to navigate back to the volume mixer.
Sorry, what the hell is this? Do engineers at Microsoft actually think this is sensible, usable and accessible?
It's like the new settings UI on mac os. It's all list. Before there were different layout patterns (Grid, then sectioned forms inside tabs). Great for spatial memorization. They've thrown it out of the windows for something that only works for small vertical screens with touch. It also sucks if you're using a mouse with the iPad.
Now I'm imagining a kind of spreadsheet-based hell where the UI is one enormous vertically scrollable grid of cells that are sometimes labels and sometimes inputs and sometimes buttons...
I feel like I caught a glimpse of it once or twice in the VB5 / Java Swing days.
Yeah if engineer critises something like that UX/product will counter "yeah, but not everyone are as autistic/nerdy as you are. Normal person will never care for it". Also they really need to change something to justify their jobs. If an engineer pushes back they can make less change and might seem like they are doing nothing.
If engineer keeps pushing back, it is bad performance review and "hard to work with".
I've long been of the opinion that UI/UX "experts" cannot be full-time employees, otherwise you will get a constant stream of utterly pointless changes and redesigns to justify their employment. I'm sorry, please design the product you were asked for and move on.
UI/UX contractors are not much better - they still need to justify their billable hours somehow, leading to pointless changes.
What's really needed is internal pushback against UI changes without user studies to back them up as well as a willingness to listen to user complaints and not just brush them off as "people complain no matter what change is make hurdurdur". Perhaps also an understanding that even neutral changes (as far as usability is concerned) have a negative cost to users.
You're all correct, of course. Whenever I listen to UX/UI where I work talk about "improving" the UI or how they design things, I just want to chug on a bottle of vodka until I forget which year I'm living in. I can't stand the UI for the services we provide because it's utter shit and was designed with a laser focus on increasing KPIs and sales. I'm not sure what Microsoft's excuse is in designing such a terrible control panel replacement. The only small solace I can find is that all our competitors are designing their UIs the exact same way. Or maybe that's just more depressing. I can't decide.
I don't even see it as increasing KPIs or sales. Unless it's sales as in selling the idea to the leadership.
A lot of it is trying to make it look visually and superficially impressive trying to apply the common hammers like whitespace, very little visible content at once as to not "overwhelm" the user and other rules to anything, and then trying to pretend whatever that is going to increase the sales by doing non-sensical user research, only listening to what proves their initial vision and then later trying to cherry-pick success metrics.
A/B test the new Settings panel:
If User spends more time in the Settings page -> We just increased engagement. They must really like the new Settings page and find that pleasurable to use. That's a win.
User spends less time in the Settings page -> We made it quicker to find and tweak the correct settings. That's amazing.
Either way, any change you make you can find wins. You could even keep going back and forth between two versions.
Also another common flaw I notice with some redesigns or things in general is that when the features, e.g. config settings were initially released, there was very thorough understanding and need for that feature and whoever put it there knew the technical implications and why it is needed, and they put it there in such a way that it's reasonably easy to use and makes sense with other things.
However when redesigning, you are going to be exposed to all those features and nuances at once. And you won't have a good understanding of everything at all and all the little details and implications. And you might want to start with some sort of feel, framework and design to handle all of that. But then you are going to approach those features from an aspect where you have to take the features and make them adapt to the design as opposed to considering what makes sense specifically for that feature. And you won't have good understanding of the features, so either you are reducing the scope a lot or also just implement features incorrectly or in a poor way, not working well together with some other features, etc.
I was specifically talking about where I work with that criticism about KPI and sales. I have no idea what might be driving Microsoft's design philosophy.
Yeah, I wanted to specify that in my experience everyone does want increased sales and have results with KPIs, but many times these things actually won't do it. Maybe they will improve some KPIs, but still won't have results where they would bring in more sales/profits. E.g. KPIs are cherrypicked, gamed in some way, they are flawed, increasing the KPIs comes at cost of something else, so sales are actually unaffected or they even have a negative effect.
Or at least leadership definitely and obviously wants it, but product and design under leadership wants to just convince leadership that it's going to do that. But frequently it isn't or it's very difficult to analyze that data and it's easy to cherry pick flawed metrics retroactively to try to convince leadership that it actually did some improvements. It's difficult to question and verify any sort of metrics without launching a whole investigation into it yourself, which rarely someone would have an incentive to do so.
It could be that at your workplace maybe these things actually do improve KPIs and sales, I would actually be more happy with that compared to if there are meaningless changes or changes that make things worse that don't improve sales at all.
My problem with KPIs and sales is that I've seen the people I work with actively make decisions that make the experience worse for our users because it increases the amount and/or value of sales we make, verified through A/B testing. Meanwhile ignoring or deprioritising legitimate issues because it can be very difficult to "prove" that it would increase KPIs.
I like the part where it clearly knows a tv with sound is disconnected but it doesnt switch to the only working audio device. Trips around the settings and back get all the more interesting like that.
I dont even know where my failed prints from 6 months ago are stored until it bothers me with a popup that is slightly to fast to interact with.
I belive a complicated ui should have a kind of blog where you can find all the nonsense going doen in chronological order with tags and categories.
I've kept a file called "problems.txt" for the last two years, where I record the many Windows aggravations for posterity (and for when they happen again).
I stopped using Notepad because updates were turning it to shit, now I use SciTE (with a command rigged up to run a .bat to insert time and date on a key combo, which is the one thing I missed from Notepad).
> I dont even know where my failed prints from 6 months ago are stored
Bluetooth & devices > Printers & Scanners > pick any printer > Open print queue. The Print Queue can also then jump between printers.
And you don't need to go into the Settings app to change sound devices. Click the Sound icon in the taskbar, click the icon to the right of the slider with what looks like little sliders and an arrow, choose your device. But even then its pretty easy using the full Settings app. System > Sound > click the circle next to the device you want to change to the default. I don't get how that's materially worse than Control Panel > Sound > Right click > Set as Default Device.
I do know how to right click the printer icon in the tray.
The os should know when new screens are attached or removed and take logical action.
If you have 2 cars in your driveway you have to chose. If one is removed, which one do you use?
Putting things under system or behind a vague icon is not instantly obvious. If i did that i would sell nothing.
That 3 things combined in one icon is wrong is already obvious where you refer to it as the sound icon. The convention is for the banana icon to open the banana menu. You switch to the banana mind set and learn new banana features.
I used to vastly prefer the old control panel hands down but the last couple of years it has been in that awkward "a lot is better on the new one but not everything" stage.
E.g. on the legacy "Sounds" none of the per app mixing, device pairing, or new filters like toggling global mono mixing are there. Some power user things are also just easier, like adjusting the non-primary sound device volume doesn't require going into the device properties and flipping to the tab for each device you want to change the volume of - it's more combined.
On the flipside the legacy "Sounds" disabled devices didn't clutter the view and there are advanced options not present in the new sections. It's also much more space efficient... though sometimes to its detriment in that the windows can't be made larger and it relies a lot on modals which can be easy to misplace and get confused on (but also useful in that they can let you see more of the information without having to flip back to other screens).
That repeats for me about everywhere. Either alone I'd probably be more than happy to use at this point but that there are two places to go each offering not quite the same set of features is the real pain point.
My favorite is Windows deciding to choose the default printer for me. I normally keep the printer turned off unless I'm actually printing something. As a result, several applications (LibreOffice off the top of my head but there have been several others) started hanging for several seconds on a dialog box on launch trying to connect to my powered down printer. So I go into the "new and improved" printer settings screen and select the Microsoft Print to PDF, thinking I'll set it to the default to bypass the issue. Except there is no option to set it as the default. I eventually go back to the main printer setting screen and realize it's possible to scroll down (not sure about light mode, but in dark mark it's hard to notice the scroll bar automatically). I scroll down and see some stupid "Let Windows manage my default printer" checkbox that got added (and enabled by default) in some recent update. I uncheck it and yay I can change my default printer.
Meanwhile in the old devices and printers control panel it was just right click -> set as default printer
> But... don't the control panel windows have more functionality (and usability) in practice?
Not only that but many pieces of the Fisher Price Settings interface still redirect to the Control Panel to get you whatever setting you're after that isn't supported.
Hopefully this means they actually completed porting it all over, rather than just destroying huge swathes of functionality. Given Microsoft's track record... 60/40.
I have a deep albeit unfounded suspicion that no developer currently at Microsoft actually knows how the old Windows interfaces like Control Panel are built, which would explain why they haven't changed at all since Windows 7 and they're just slowly but surely tacking on new, different (and worse) interfaces which resort to the same APIs. They're essentially slowly replacing the 20-odd years accumulated work done from Windows 95 onwards, which is why they still haven't entirely replaced the old interfaces and the new ones often link to the old ones so that users can still access most of the functionality.
I've had the new settings app get stuck and become unable to interact with. Not to mention all the missing settings that the old control panel still hangs on to.
I repeatedly found some setting - brightness, I think - showed the slider moved all the way to the right when the actual value was evidently less than 100%. Much puzzling later, I clicked the slider thumb, or waggled it, and the real-world setting suddenly leapt to the 100% it was claiming to be at already.
I dread the day they remove the old panel. I use the "large cursor" accessibility feature (usable from the new control panel) so that my cursor is clearly visible at all times, but it is almost unusable for programming by default because the cursor for text hovering is centered (so it's not clear at all where the cursor points to when the text cursor covers multiple lines). The way to make it usable is to edit the mouse theme to change the text cursor to something that is not centered, which requires the old mouse options.
In an ideal world, they would fix this problem by making bigger mouse cursors automatically use some proper non-centered text selection cursor, but I don't have much hope for that. I guess there will be some way through the registry in any case. Maybe we'll see alternative control panels with more features?
Maybe I'm getting old, but I vastly prefer the legacy control panel.
Their continued push to enshittify something that the world has come to know as standard was actually the final straw for me moving to Linux full time. I just thought that if I'm gonna be changing it might as well be something that isn't going to show me ads and farm me for data.
they've been slowly adding things to 11's settings menus and I understand why people might think the new one is more user friendly, but things like easily accessing wifi networks properties is more convoluted.
But why would all this matter if deprecating the control panel is on someone's KPI? KPI is their only god. There is no place for reason or engineering excellence.
Especially in the networking section, there's tons of functionality you can only access via the good old Control Panel applets.
In the Settings app there's only a "DHCP or no DHCP" option. No choice about DNS server info or DNS suffixes, no way to edit adapter settings (jumbo frames etc) and so on.
Another example, regional settings, the Settings app only allows for some bare-bones customization. Want to add additional clocks? Can't do that in Settings app.
So I truly hope this means they'll work on bringing that functionality over, rather than just removing the applets and let you sit there with the minimally functional Settings app.
But it's not necessary even in Linux. Many (most?) DEs offer control panels that let you do pretty much everything a normal power user will want to do.
Well kinda. Sure you don't go via the applet in Win11 (and I admit I forgot about that since I run Win10 still on my main machines), but all it does is launch the good old "Properties" dialog.
So it's not integrated into the Settings app. And thus could potentially go away once they deprecate the rest of the control panel, if the main point of that is to do everything through Settings app. If not, why remove the control panel?
This can be entirely configured in the settings app. It doesn't launch the older properties. So for that, not kinda the answer is just it can.
Now, jumbo frames isn't able to be set like that yet, I'll acknowledge.
> And thus could potentially go away once they deprecate the rest of the control panel, if the main point of that is to do everything through Settings app. If not, why remove the control panel?
Microsoft hasn't even said they're removing the Control Panel yet. This is an Ars Technica article blowing up a single phrase from a Microsoft support article that says:
> Tip: while the Control Panel still exists for compatibility reasons and to provide access to some settings that have not yet migrated, you're encouraged to use the Settings app, whenever possible.
So all Microsoft is saying, get used to navigating to your network adapter settings in Windows instead of relying on going through Control Panel, because sometime it might not be there. Not necessarily tomorrow, not next quarter, probably not next year, but sometime you're going to have to figure out the Settings app.
Microsoft isn't saying they're going to pull the Control Panel without offering all the functionality through Settings. But expect for more and more of the Control Panel to disappear over time.
Also, the Control Panel disappearing doesn't mean every dialog and applet that used to be linked through there would necessarily disappear.
You're reading a lot into that small sentence if your takeaway is they'll be removing Jumbo Frame support.
> This can be entirely configured in the settings app.
How? I can change DNS server, but not suffix info.
> But expect for more and more of the Control Panel to disappear over time.
Right, but they're also not saying explicitly that they'll move all the settings that exist in the old Control Panel. And given their history, it's not a given that they'll do just that.
> You're reading a lot into that small sentence if your takeaway is they'll be removing Jumbo Frame support.
It wouldn't be the first time they removed access to some essential settings before back-pedaling. That said, sure, they'll probably add access to that stuff.
Of course, it's entirely possible someone else is at the helm of this area of Windows now, one that actually cares about power users. In which case my worries are probably unfounded.
I can imagine a series of events at MS like below (A pure imagination):
1. A new UX head is hired and looks for something that will make them look important.
2. Initiate a usability research across all the features in the Windows UI.
3. Make an internal announcement. "Our research shows that many users are scared of changing settings in Control Panel. They are afraid of breaking the system by changing anything there. We will create a new UX for changing settings in a simple, intuitive, and innovative way."
4. They hire many UX researchers, visual designers, UI prototypers, and of course many middle managers.
5. A year later, another announcement. "We now have a complete understanding of how we can create a simple, intuitive, and innovative user experience. Now our engineering team will implement this in upcoming years."
6. They hire many product managers, UI engineers, program managers, QA team, and of course many middle managers.
7. Two years later, another announcement. "We are launching the new innovative UX that replaces Control Panel".
8. Get a lot of internal feedback. "The new UI doesn't let me change X or Y setting", "The new UI is too slow", "Too much whitespace in the new UI", etc. They are all ignored as "working as intended". They say "X and Y settings are used by very few users. Use the old UI for those settings."
9. Several years later, "We don't have enough engineering resources to maintain two different apps. Let's kill Control Panel."
I so badly wish they'd open-source Windows. It wasn't bad enough that they refuse to fix obviously bad code, but they also don't allow the very many talented performance engineers submit PRs that would do in a month what they couldn't get done in years.
> I so badly wish they'd open-source Windows. It wasn't bad enough that they refuse to fix obviously bad code, but they also don't allow the very many talented performance engineers submit PRs that would do in a month what they couldn't get done in years.
Being open-source wouldn't fix things like that.
It'll be just like Gnome: PRs that fix UI gaffes wouldn't be accepted because "The Developers Know Better!"
Of course [1]! How would they give consistent, cleanly designed UI. I find the UX/UI much more cohesive than Windows' where some apps look like flat boxes (metro UI), others look like classic Windows.
You thought open-source means there'd be no design and they'd only jam code, while designing and architecturing is only for proprietary projects within ivy towered castles?
That's just wishful thinking, but I wish there was a way to license the NT kernel and other core OS components. That way, other companies could work to add usable and performant userspace components to their version of Windows, with users finally being relieved of dealing with the batshit crazy UI and other warts Microsoft keeps on adding.
The only ones that I've found are Windows "mods" that use a combination of NTLite[1] for feature removal and slipstreaming and some edits to icon resources in system32.dll etc.
Did you have something else in mind? Email is in my profile in case you have a link that you can share.
Depending on the kinds of games you play, Linux + Proton can provide an excellent gaming experience now, often times better than on Windows, with fewer stutters.
Some multiplayer games with kernel rootkit/anticheat might not work, but I haven't encountered any Linux-specific issues in the games I play. I'm sure this isn't the experience for everyone but it's worth a try.
What drives me nuts is that even though Windows is the only os I have paid for it's also the only os I use which doesn't include full disk encryption (unless I pay even more). Linux is free and comes with it. Macos is freeish and comes with it. Windows home costs over $100 and doesn't. Those built in ads are also ironic.
Grey market pro keys are like $5 on ebay. I have zero qualms buying them when such a basic and critical form of security is absent from the base edition. It’s malpractice.
Maybe they could consider an Apple-style approach: open source the core of the kernel and text-mode user space but leave the GUI closed.
Of course, open sourcing everything would be even better, but that might too big of a step for them. Open sourcing the non-GUI core could be a good initial step, whether or not it ends up going further.
my guess is if they did it it would be under some odd ball license just to make sure its code couldn't be incorporated into other penguin themed operating systems
There were a few of these staples that I could always rely on to fix issues for friends and family. I remember them from 20 years ago and they kept working reliably. Since I've long transitioned to using only Linux both at home and work, I have no idea how to get anything done in these fancy new lean and modern "streamlined" UIs and am not of much help to Windows users. At least so far Control Panel was there but even so, some things were added only to the dumb new UI parts. I think MS managers may be forgetting how much their users have been relying on their IT whiz kid relative or friend. If you cull power user features, you indirectly make life harder for the average user too.
By the time Windows 8 rolled around Microsoft wanted a 'unified' UX across devices so bad that they threw the desktop and laptop users completely under the bus. Most people can barely remember just how unusable the first new UX Word was on a laptop screen before years of reluctant rollbacks reclaimed some screen realestate for actual work. But hey, "Just imagine 30% app store revenue for every application on every PC" is a powerfull enough motivator to sacrifice even the UX on.
I still use Word 2003 because the ribbon is evil (translated, it degrades the advantages of a toolbar and takes twice as many clicks to get things done).
I recently worked on an admin project with a group of varying experience and grade, from months to decades using MS Office. It's the first time in years I've had to use 'ribbon' apps.
Not one of the staff used the ribbon directly, they just searched for everything using Word's titlebar search field and picked the option from the results. Every time, unless it was something like embolden that has a keyboard shortcut.
I tried hunting and pecking through the ribbon but it was such a guessing-game, trying to imagine where the UX designer had filed the option, that I eventually relented and started using the search field too.
That's the problem. Toolbar buttons ought to be ONE-click shortcuts. Menus are multi-click.
My frustration stemmed primarily from having to constantly bounce back and forth between toolbar tabs to get certain tasks done (it's been a while so I can't remember the exact use cases, maybe formatting table borders and fonts/bold/etc). In those cases it legit doubled my clicks.
The ribbon essentially took my menus, and made them waste vast amounts of precious vertical screen real estate - not to mention less consistency in presentation & discoverability (particularly when other software I wasn't as familiar with began to copy the trend).
If I recall, older versions also did a better job of surfacing keyboard shortcuts (via tooltips), so you would inherently learn the ones you used most as you used the software.
I'm jealous - I held onto Excel 2003 until 2018 at which point Win10 couldn't really run it anymore - all office after 2003 is a step backwards IMO
I use Office 2010 which seems moderately stable (2007 was a complete mess) + ubitmenu though I am occasionally irked that 2010 isn't fully compatible with nested comments some colleagues use...
Yeah, Libre Office has -IMO- the best approach by allowing different UIs and i find the "single toolbar" superior to the ribbon-like interface or the "mass overload" of toolbars the default/office-2003-like UI has.
Obviously the single toolbar only provides the most common and basic functionality but that's what i'd need in a toolbar - and if i'd need more i could probably customize it (probably, i don't know, never had the need :-P).
All this engineering effort for what? The new settings stuff is materially worse than the old stuff.
Part of me is just amazed at how slow large corps are - what does everyone do??
In so many areas the new stuff is not features complete or equivalent after years and years. And the usability is worse. And comically, despite going to a "modern" solution - the whole things runs SLOWER by far than classic settings which was near instant.
So both they why for the change and the seeming insanely slow pace of getting the old working (again) on the new and improved are both questions I think.
Sounds, printers, mouse, networking, user management and more - I feel like I'm always trying to fight my way back to harder to find classic control panels after trying to do stuff with the improved versions.
For larger installs you used to be able to loin to audit mode, customize a profile and make it the default for new users. That was super easy for even non-IT folks to do to get a baseline setup that seemed to cover almost all settings. Now that's gotten "improved" into garbage as well.
Instead we are getting UWP apps (mostly garbage) that can be hard to uninstall if provisioned in weird ways to a user.
This isn't exclusive to Microsoft, but it seems like all the research that went into Windows 95 isn't being repeated for new software. Windows 95, despite its flaws had actual UX research going into designing the project. It doesn't seem like that type of work is being done anymore, Apple also isn't exactly perfect here either, their new control/settings app is equally awful.
There's is an aversion to making software boring, but functional, but that's what most of us need. Microsoft could have frozen their UI in Windows 2000 era and it would have been fine for the majority of uses.
There have been very few advancements in OS design for Windows that have really improved since Windows 2000. USB support. WiFi manager. Firewall. SATA support. 64-bit. Native TRIM support. Native antivirus. And some things like desktop search have just gotten significantly less usable over time.
Win2k still very much feels like a nearly feature complete OS. It's got one of my favorite features: it shuts up and gets out of the way.
God, yes. It's exactly this. Windows 10 is always in my way, bothering me, nagging me. When it isn't being actively hostile, it's still in the way because so much just doesn't work.
And it just keeps getting worse over time, it's really astounding.
The start menu search rarely works. I have been using the app constantly. It has come up in search many times previously. Then, nothing. I have to drill down through the file system to start mutherfucking Notepad++ or Visual Studio Code.
This bug has been present since after Windows 7, which was definitely my favorite Windows version. It was done.
I have to use Windows at work, and one thing that hugely improves the experience is the "Everything" search tool [1]. It searches across all files you have in something like a second or two, and when you type it narrows down suggestions as you'd expect instead of randomly bringing up something completely unrelated. I even use it to launch programs I don't have pinned to the taskbar (it will find both .exes and .lnk shortcuts with readable names).
Compared to that, search
in the start menu (or Windows Explorer for that matter) is so comically bad it makes me weep. Before I knew about Everything, I could maybe believe there is something about NTFS or Windows security or whatever that makes it impossible to do fast quality search across the filesystem in modern Windows. But no, it's clearly possible, and it's such a shame that Microsoft is incapable of doing that in its own OS.
Windows search is so bad that you can type "NOTE" and it'll be seconds, on a freaking supercomputer, before "Notepad" appears. This is insane. The list of applications on my computer is in the very low hundreds total, and the number of users with literally hundreds of thousands or millions of apps is very, very low. It can and should be in the search bar's RAM at all times and a linear search should be orders of magnitude below my human perception speed to say nothing of better algorithms.
So, OK, sure, the alpha version couldn't do that, and the beta version couldn't do that, and by golly, launching apps quickly didn't make the release list... sure. But why hasn't this obvious optimization ever risen to the top of the feature list in the last several years?
The obvious answer is that nobody in Microsoft is empowered to care about the experience as a whole anymore, and it shows.
The slightly less obvious answer is that I bet Microsoft management has simply written off Windows now. It's not Cloud enough and too hard to make services- and subscription-based even if they put their best efforts in. I think they're going to discover that it was more foundational to their business than they realized.
The only way I'd use Windows is for work or a specific purpose like gaming. AKA I turn the computer on, launch a few software and stayed in those until I shut it down. I wouldn't bear with it for personal computing. macOS is heading the same way (minus the ads, plus the phone-like interface). Linux may be rough, but I can do whatever I want with it.
This may be related to smartphones now being old enough that your average young adult entering the workforce is more familiar with their interface than a Win95 style interface.
I would bet the average 20 year old can connect a new Bluetooth device on a phone OS faster than they can get to the Sound settings page of Win95.
I don’t think UX is static. The UI patterns we recognize change with what we’re exposed to. The Control Panel doesn’t look terribly far off from a terminal app ported to a GUI. It’s also pretty alien to someone accustomed to smartphones.
Older adults have used smartphones, but young adults have never used Win95, so a smartphone style interface is more usable for more people. I’m with you, I prefer the Control Panel, but Settings may be more utilitarian.
I remember having to point people to the hamburger menu because they couldn't figure out it was a menu. The other week a girl said it would be nice if my website had a menu. Turns out the new generation only understands flat icons. If you make a row of the machine like win 95 buttons they don't see it. "you can click on that? I thought those were just decoration!"
The moral of the story is that it is all about conditioning. MS should have left everything the way it was. The money they could have made! I could thoughtlessly click around and do everything on muscle memory.
Change things often enough and no one is comfortable. There are no improvements. A new user might like it, they might even like it more than the old user liked their iteration. Say, 5% better for 3% of the users 0.15% improvement in total vs 15% worse for 97% making it 14.55% worse. The difference is 100X
> "you can click on that? I thought those were just decoration!"
That is hilarious, that is one of my main complaint about modern flat UI is that it's almost never clear that you can click something. Everything looks like decorations or just text.
Turns out the new generation only understands flat icons. If you make a row of the machine like win 95 buttons they don't see it. "you can click on that? I thought those were just decoration!"
I don't understand how Win 95 icons are meaningfully different than the icons on a smartphone home screen. Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you meant.
In a way that goes back to the skeuomorphism debate around buttons whether they should be drawn flat or 3D effect, where even Office 97 was trying to get rid of buttons looking like buttons and the affordance that they can be pressed, and whether that makes sense on a non-physical thing.
Windows 95 might have been the last time anyone actually sat down and thought through how to design a UI. Everything since then has been a reiteration on previous ideas.
Back then you could still tell someone the thing they worked hard on sucked, it's terrible, it needs to be deleted and we need to pretend it never happened. Then you worked all night to prove it sucked only to be told you made it worse. And then, you started over. No crocodile tears, no excuses.
Besides all this politeness getting in the way of honest opinion, scaling this to throwing away a multi million project 10 times in a row is hard. Might even seem illogical.
The most genuinely bad and frustrating part of the new control panel that made me ask "did literally anyone even test this for 5 minutes" are any of the pages where you have a list of things longer than 6 or 7 items. Like per-app sound device options, or associating a program with a file extension, or even just uninstalling a program.
* No way to search or filter the list, or jump to the extension I want (PDF), let me first scroll past .3gp, etc
* List items are comically large, it must be like 10% of the information density from before
* The whole thing is just sloooooww
A regression in every sense of the word :(
Not to mention all the things that are straight up missing from the new control panel, like all the right-click options currently available in the Audio Devices dialog.
Here’s one example of why it takes ages — drivers that grab the window handle of a control panel and hack at it to show custom UI. Old example that specifically addresses the Displays and Printers control panels, but similar hacks probably still exist today.
When you have no external business to compete with you end up with managers competing internally. They're literally just burning cash trying to look busy and distinguished.
Anyways.. watch any Microsoft "vision of the future" video from 1990 and it's basically just Teams. It took them 30 years to fully establish the steaming pile of bizarre Share Point plugins that is Teams.
> The new settings stuff is materially worse than the old stuff.
This depends on who your audience is, and I'm shocked by this community not seeing it.
The new settings are far more intuitive for non-experience users who are more comfortable with an iPad than a traditional computer. That's where the market is. The enthusiast demographic who actually understands what the settings mean and how the machine works is minuscule.
Having a function simply not exist can not count towards making it more intuitive to control that function.
Having simple controls that don't accomplish tasks is not a valid example of simple controls to accomplish tasks, and I'm shocked at anyone here not seeing it.
If this theory of the users needs were true, then everyone would and should just use Chromebooks.
The reason Windows exists and must be used by so many even when they don't want to, why a Chromebook or an iPad doesn't cut it, is Windows is where all the actual unimaginably varied productivity and special purpose software is. Not because of the middle of the road generic office and web apps. It's because of those PLUS the infinite other. It takes both to be useful not just the big mass in the middle of the bell curve.
No matter how much bigger the numbers are for the common case, things need to cover all cases in order to be useful. Trying to reduce Windows down to a Chromebook or an iPad is silly when the Windows95 paradigm was already the simplification.
Windows without the functionality of Windows is nothing. An iPad is far better at that than a simplified Widows can ever be. Even if somehow MS managed to make an excellent iPad, then what? iPads already exist and someone else is famous for them. Meanwhile, the thing they ripped out was their very value proposition itself. The differentiator that gives them a reason to exist at all.
All that supposedly unwanted complicated stuff was litterally the primary value and differentiator of the product itself.
> The new settings are far more intuitive for non-experience users who are more comfortable with an iPad than a traditional computer.
Right but the iPad UX is also terrible. All I can really do is remove and recreate. There’s no way to actually fix anything. This isn’t necessary. Advanced options could be exposed in iOS too. It’s just bad design everywhere.
I understand your point from a purely aesthetic standpoint.
However the second that a commonly needed setting is required you're going a layer "deeper" (it's not because before it was at the first level) and that aesthetic is broken. I doubt the iPad first crowd is going to really intuit that.
I use the old control panel but one should concede that it's really quite esoteric and the new control panel is comparatively more straight forward.
I'm also amazed at software developers complaining about Microsoft's development process for the Settings app. They've been incrementally developing it for years -- which is a good thing -- and yet there so many complaints here that it didn't materialize fully formed on day one. It's like when talking about Microsoft everyone forgets how software development is actually done.
The old control panel has a very logical layout, and that's why it stayed this way for so long. But it was also an expert tool and you ought to go there with the manual close at hand because it was so powerful. Like the networks sections having everything related to network thay you may want. Maybe there should be a beginner mode, but you don't want a beginner near those settings. Just like I rarely see people go into their network connection settings on iOS. The rewrite feels like taking Photoshop and morph it into Paint. Easier to understand but ultimately worthless.
But 99.99% of users are "beginners". I really don't know how to use Photoshop but I can use simpler paint tools to do what I want.
Microsoft will not remove the control panel until you can do everything with the Settings app (or something else not yet invented). Despite this "deprecation" it's really not going anywhere.
My use of the settings app has slowly increased over time as more and more settings are available there. I have to be doing something pretty specific to open the control panel now.
The Windows Control Panel was first released in 1985. That’s 39 years ago. That’s longer than the time between the Wright Brothers’ first flight and the first jet aircraft.
How is Microsoft still doing fundamental rewrites of core features?
I still don't get what you mean. Clearly Windows isn't the same as it was 39 years ago and if it didn't change in all that time we wouldn't still be using it. Every operating system rewrites fundamental core features all the time.
The X Window System was originally released June 1984. That's 40 years ago.
And yet we're still having debates and active development on how to have graphical sessions on Linux.
iptables was released in 1998. That's 26 years ago. And yet those Linux devs are still working on nftables and firewalld.
If those Linux devs still haven't figured out how to do graphical sessions or firewall by now they never will.
FFS how to boot/init Linux is still under active development and some rapid changes over the past several years. If they can't even figure out how to boot how can you take those devs seriously?
Or maybe you redesign your stuff for the realities of today instead of just assuming what a few people did in the 80s was the be-all end-all of software and UI design.
And yet, back in the 90s most of the non-experienced users learned to use their computer nonetheless, in some cases gaining deeper understanding through the process of navigating the logically structured interface.
Maybe it's more profitable to keep your users inexperienced. Easier to sell them cruft that way.
Right? Most of us who were children at the time learned how to use 95/98 by ourselves. The vast majority of people had to learn how to use 95/98, and most had never touched a computer before.
I don't think this demographic of tablet users who can't ever possibly accept another UI style actually exists. Poking at an unknown object to figure out how it works is not some ancient lost art. It's one of the most basic things that all humans do. We do this as infants.
Gods, imagine how frightened and confused DOS users were by Windows.
Totally. I was there, porting a FoxPro DOS app to Visual FoxPro and one of the biggest fights with the boss was about why I was adding multiple windows in the app.
And I remember that the mouse was something that confused users.
And the joke about using the CD drawer to put the coffee there? I see it.
Yet, all those users (school managers and a lot of old ladies) get it anyway.
What irks me most about the new Settings app is the lack of keyboard shortcuts. Sure, you can use the arrows to jump around the different elements but whatever happened to good old Alt-F, etc.? Plus, on a traditional menu bar, every keyboard shortcut is clearly labeled. Not so for Settings.
Frankly just because the interface looks more tablet-like doesn't mean it's actually ergonomic for tablet use either.
What they are presenting us is far more like the 90's Macromedia Flash style UI bloatware that hardware peripheral manufacturers also keep trying to foist onto us.
That could be somewhat true if Settings was feature complete. It's not really for iPad audience if you have to spin up RegEdit and google for an afternoon to do half of the stuff you could do by clicking around Control Panel.
Also, ability to filter or sort a list wouldn't confuse iPad audience all that much, would it?
The fact you are trying to copy someone shouldn't prevent you from making it better in some basic ways.
I’ve been a Mac user for more than 20 years and I may be in a minority of one, but I prefer the new settings. When I use my old Mac with the old settings I find myself thinking “so which image do I need to click to do what I want?” but in the new settings I can find what I need from the text labels.
I was a Mac user for about six years, went back to Windows through necessity, and returned to Mac four years ago. I don't hate the new Mac System Settings, but for me it's not as intuitive as the old version. Nor is the iPhone/iPad settings app easy to navigate. I don't completely understand the reasoning for the order or grouping of things. Then I realize I have no control over it, shrug my shoulders, and get on with finding and using the options I want.
catering to developers is important in a completely different way than catering to typical users. I have one stomach for dinner and another for desert.
Right, he could just end by stating that corporations employ useless people who then do useless things to justify their employment like they always did, like every large organisation ever. But then he had to go all modern identity politics on it. It fries brains of its opponets just as much if not more than its supporters.
48.3% whites are a minority and they are underrepresented compared to the 59.3% in the U.S. population.
That is just for background. GP tried to make the case that developers engaging in diversity initiatives, who are often white, do this for their career. In other words, they are unproductive B players, who will hire C players in order to keep their jobs. They also discourage A players from engaging in work.
You could plausibly be referring to Windows 11, Windows 10, Windows 8, Windows Vista or Windows ME. Making this strange line of argument just seem idiosyncratic and more about your own feelings on "inclusivity" than objective analysis of software quality.
ME was a rushed attempt at making DOS-based Windows less DOS-like, while Vista was perhaps too extravagant in its UI. 8 is when the nosedive started and things began getting really dumbed-down as they decided to rewrite huge swaths of previously working functionality and broke much of it in the process.
11 is, according to Microsoft in their official marketing material, "the most inclusively designed version of Windows". They sure are right about that -- they included a bunch of idiots in the design process.
> while Vista was perhaps too extravagant in its UI
Vista was a fine OS. The aero glass stuff was a little on the side of bad taste, but the UI usability wasn't bad, there was little difference in UI between Vista (the hated OS) and 7 aside from visuals, the layout of UI elements was mostly the same. And in terms of look, I can't say it was worse than the fisher price styling of Windows XP. Windows 2000 is where Microsoft aesthetics peaked and it's been downhill ever since.
The main reason Vista was hated was because it was very resource hungry compared to XP and most computers could barely handle it. 7's improvements on that side of things were rather minor, and most of the reason why people loved 7 is because they ran it with hardware that was modern enough so the experience didn't feel as slow as running Vista on 1gb of ram and an intel igpu (back then, intel igpu were unreasonably terrible. If you can do moderate gaming on low settings on modern igpus, back in the day, the intel igpu couldn't even run the UI of Vista, no AeroGlass/GPU compositing for you).
Most of the truly needed architectural change in Windows for the sake of reliability and security happened with Vista, though! Vista is when the graphic stack moved back to the user space and Windows became the OS that handled GPU driver crashes best. I remember when I had an ATi GPU with terrible drivers how good it felt to not reboot the computer or lose unsaved work as Windows could restart the driver on the fly and it wouldn't cause any issue except for 3d rendering software (so games would still crash in such a situation).
Vista also virtualized some of the filesystem calls so that programs used to having full permissions to write in folders they had no business to write to could run in userspace without admin rights.
All the changes Vista did piled up in terms of overhead, making it a heavier OS, but it was all for good reasons. Some of the overhead could have been avoided if Windows had been designed the right way to begin with (like not letting people get used to running software with admin accounts) but Vista did what it could to make Windows a better OS. People who hated Vista just didn't understand how needed those improvements, which we take for granted today, were. I still remember those worms circulating on the internet instantly pwning computers just for /being on the internet/ during Windows XP's era. Installing XP from unpatched mediums like an old CD and then connecting to the internet to get updates was very risky without being behind a NAT or firewall.
I really feel grateful towards the work the Windows team did during the Vista era, that windows can be considered a decent OS at all is all coming from the legacy of the groundwork they did on its foundations.
People being given preferential hiring because of their race or sex is inherently racist and sexist. He's perfectly justified to be upset over widespread racism in the tech industry, especially when it is also leading to noticable drops in software development quality. The real question is why do you seem to support explicit racism and sexism?
They should first fix their search. The new settings are overwhelming and I end up having so many clicks when I need something like adding Hyper-V or add a Bluetooth device.
Then, there’s the Windows search. If you ever tried using Settings and search. Most of the time you end up getting Edge opened with an outdated link or unhelpful Bing search.
I just hope they won’t axe it until figuring out how they make decent settings.
Ironically, the same company showed how to perfectly execute a settings page in Visual Studio Code: It's searchable, has a consistent and intuitive grouping, a simple way to get help for each individual setting and an import/export functionality. But I suppose, it's from a different department...
It also requires manual JSON for many things, which are also not searchable, nor assistive-tool friendly because it relies on individually navigating through a tree of autocomplete rather than viewing them all on a single page...
vscode's settings are easily my least favorite modern pattern, and I am flabbergasted that it's spreading to other tools. The "it's one big scrollable list with a sidebar nav" is great in some ways, but everything else about it is downright awful.
JSON(5, with comments) as a config storage format? And optional editing UI? Oh heck yes, that's perfectly reasonable.
Requiring manual JSON editing, even with fancy autocomplete? Hell no. Turn that into a UI with the same info you show in the autocomplete. Obviously. WTF VSCode. WTF every tool that has copied this. This is not even slightly acceptable.
I liked that part, but I'm fully with you that many UX decisions in VS code are completely inscrutable. Such as building an entire UI toolkit without any ability to show dialogs - and then requiring plugin authors to awkwardly work around this limitation by abusing the quick navigation and autocomplete functionalities - and if that doesn't work, have the users manually edit json files...
I still don't know how to switch to the JSON-only view the few times that I need it.
And I hate that quite a few extensions have a vague "just set X in settings" in their README's where X doesn't show up in the auto generated UI, and is called something else in JSON
Like tredre3 said there's also a button on the top right corner of settings, but I tend to prefer to start directly into json mode through the command palette.
Being able to find any sort of action with the palette just by typing is hands down the best UI design I've experienced in software. It's not new, Unity had it in the older Ubuntu distributions, but it's unfortunately not seen often enough and Ubuntu lost it when they moved to Gnome.
The palette search box also has the smart design of placing to the top functions you use the most through the palette, so if you open the json settings a few times it'll pop up at the top before you even finish typing the word "settings".
After a while, your interactions with the palette make its UI feel very personalized to your needs.
But I've never used a sophisticated application that does most of its config via registry editing. It's for extreme edge cases only, where it's basically fine - it's a worse about:config, but it serves the same purpose, you only go in there when you already know what you need to do.
vscode, in contrast, puts common things into hand-edited-json-only config. I don't think I've ever had a vscode project that didn't require json changes to work correctly. That's ridiculous.
> It's searchable, has a consistent and intuitive grouping, a simple way to get help for each individual setting and an import/export functionality.
IIRC, Eclipse had all of that (or maybe all that except for import/export?) five+ years prior to VS Code's first public release.
And given that "Do a substring search through this huge-ass mess of options and switches and winnow down to the matches" is such a blindingly obvious thing to add in when you get so very many options in your configuration GUI, I'd be shocked if there weren't several things that predate Eclipse that did that, too.
The new menu would actually be quite ok if you could configure what’s on the main menu and what’s on “More”. The old menu has a ton of stuff I never use so in theory it would be nice to push that to a secondary menu. But the UX geniuses have decided it’s better to have random stuff I never use in the shorter first menu and the stuff I really need is on the second. It would be so easy to configure this. What are these geniuses thinking? (I guess they don’t think much….)
Putting the things I use the most closest to my mouse. It's great. I spent two seconds figuring out the icons the first time I encountered it and now it's faster for me.
Did you mean to add the bingsearchdisabled twice to work around some issue where it persists like a virus, or was that a typo for E.G. the computer rather than the user?
No I messed up somewhere. I remember I did have 3 regedits at one time (in this part of the decrapify list). The count was right so I didn't pay attention.
Usually, I have no particular nostalgia for old designs—everyone praises Windows 3.1 but to me it's just eye-searing. But, even I can't stand the new search. A nontrivial amount of the time—and on two different machines IIRC—I'll open the search menu and type something, but my keystrokes just don't register. I have to close and reopen the start menu. And, actually opening the start menu takes a noticeably long time. I don't know if it's doing some last-minute indexing or something, but it's very annoying.
And the same is true for the settings app. I never really use the Control Panel–specific settings, and whitespace doesn't bother me, so I'm not inherently opposed to the new app. But the execution just feels subpar somehow—if I had to guess, it's probably the latency whenever you click anything.
(macOS also has all kinds of weird UI bugs too, e.g. the Bluetooth and sound dropdowns in the top menubar are very finicky for me. And System Preferences proper isn't much better. It drives me crazy....)
> everyone praises Windows 3.1 but to me it's just eye-searing
Windows 3.1 is better than earlier Windows, but I haven't seen a claim that it's better than Win95?
I don't really think 3.1 is eye-searing, but I think the basic design is pulled forward from 3.0 which ran on mostly any video card, but feels designed around 16 colors. Wikipedia says 3.1 requires vga, but they didn't make things pretty by default until 95.
In hindsight, I think I mixed up 3.1 and 95 (they’re both before my time). So I guess my actual controversial opinion is that I’m very glad UIs don’t look like Windows 95 anymore :-P
Of course, all this is a matter of personal preference—I just think that nostalgia plays an underappreciated role in these discussions.
The whole point of search is to send you to Edge. They have no motivation to fix search, only to push more of their products. If you want a better life, abandon ship.
My main dev machine is macOS for better and worse. But since we do cross platform and target Windows. I ended up getting a proper Windows machine following Apple silicon transition.
Linux is less being used by our customers and for my job less useful / WSL or Mac VM is enough.
I wish they would just integrate Everything. It works fast, has an intuitive UI, and doesn't have any of the wacky search/sort bugs that stock Explorer has.
This is because a particular support page has "The Control Panel is in the process of being deprecated in favor of the Settings app, which offers a more modern and streamlined experience.". Crazy how that somehow has spawned endless articles from tech "news" sites. But it's hardly news, and saying they've 'officially deprecated' is misleading. Fact is The Control Panel has been in the 'process of being deprecated' since Windows 8.
Setting file associations is the worst UX regression in the W11 Settings app.
For example, say I want to set Irfanview to be my default application to view images. I need to go through every file type that Irfanview can open, then select Irfanview. I can't tell Windows just to use Irfanview for all the formats that it can handle.
I never bother to manually set file associations, when I find a file that doesn't open in the right app I just use the "Open with > Other app > always use this app" option to set it
They are really alienating their user base. Someone I know had their work PC moved to Windows 11, she has been swearing like a drunken sailor since about not being able to find things.
She only cares about Excel a and email, but have been having a very hard time with 11. Once people finds out Linux User Experience with KDE does not change that much, people may start moving.
That's just a link to the "All Tasks" view of Control Panel with some extra characters stuck in front, not an actual separate mode. If deprecating the Control Panel only ever means the main Control Panel view and shortcut itself then that will be an alternative. If deprecating the Control Panel means eventually these views, and their associated tools, go away too then this will be no different.
It is a different list. E.g., the CP in my 11 Pro has just one panel under File Explorer Options, but multiple in the "God Mode" folder (which I recognize from the Explorer Settings). Some items in de GM folder open the same panel, though. Probably a hack for the search feature (a depressing thought).
It's practical to have them in a straight-forward list. Plus now I can have a short-cut directly to the power scheme, event though it still won't let me put it in the task bar. Windows is weird, which makes me believe this list is never going to go away. It would be too much trouble.
> It is a different list. E.g., the CP in my 11 Pro
Sorry, it probably wasn't clear - not everything in the All Tasks view is necessarily exposed in other views of the Control Panel. That doesn't imply it's something completely independent of Control Panel though, it means you can't get to all views of Control Panel by clicking from the main view. I.e. it's not that this doesn't list more things than the main Control Panel view will, it's that it's part of Control Panel which would also be removed if Control Panel is ever "actually" removed fully instead of just having the main shortcuts to it removed. You're actually pretty close with:
> a hack for the search feature
As the Control Panel search will indeed filter via this view since it has everything.
It's good to know that exists, but having to rename a folder on the desktop to a magic incantation with a GUID in it is not an acceptable replacement for the previous control panel.
Google (rightly) catches a lot of grief for having multiple overlapping products (e.g. Chat), but Microsoft should be equally shamed for having such a hodge-podge of overlapping configuration interfaces in their own OS. In Windows 11, there's really no telling if the setting your're looking for will be in one of the newer/flat interfaces or a classic Windows GUI window.
Good. Should have happened earlier.
The old one wasn’t perfect in any way. It could have been modernized slowly over the years instead of adding a new incomplete one. The jump between them becomes very jarring. But the new one has felt like a toy presumably because the old one could handle those grown-up jobs.
But not having search(?), for example, makes the old one inferior no matter how familiar, dense, or “usable” the old one was.
If I type DNS in the settings search then I have to find the DNS settings, it’s that simple. If one version fails this test and one succeeds then the ranking is clear regardless of the rest of the UX.
But mostly I’m just going to come out and say it: I like redesigns and UX design is a feature in itself, while utilitarian design and familiarity is constantly overrated. Never moving anyone’s cheese is just catering to existing users at the expense of new ones.
> not having search(?), for example, makes the old one inferior no matter how familiar, dense, or “usable” the old one was.
Control panel have had a working search function, introduced in Vista. It worked in start menu, too, and was very much polished in Windows 7, before they've introduced any of the "modern" crap.
> The Control Panel is in the process of being deprecated in favor of the Settings app, which offers a more modern and streamlined experience.
Is modern and streamlined what I want in a control panel replacement? When I think of modern and streamlined, I think about things that are so simple they aren't useful anymore, because they've replaced the complexity of control over a messy process with the intuitiveness of only having the illusion of control over a messy process.
It's actually amazing how old Windows is, and how many vestigial bits of ancient GUI versions are still a part of the OS. There's various levels of the UI: The newbie consumer level, the pro-user level, and the sys-admin level. The top is always changing, then the pro-user stuff gets updates after a while (always missing options which drives power users batshit), and then the low-level stuff which works fine and there's no reason to ever update just for looks.
That's where you run into truly ancient designs that haven't changed since the 90s. Event viewer, remote tools, driver install, etc.
And it's all still in there, using god knows what common .dlls from the dozen or so GUI toolkits that have come and gone. You have to admit, it shows an impressive longevity.
I just have to assume that Microsoft doesn't prioritize updating those elderly dialog boxes and tools because it's a thankless (and profit-less) task, which takes longer than expected and always filled with crazy edge cases and gotchas. They spent several years just updating the command line - granted, that's an important app which touched a lot of the OS, but it just shows the perils of messing with stuff that already works.
This is all modern examples but there are still bits hidden deeply within system that come from 9x times. I remember when MS published interface guidelines with Vista but the document was quickly forgotten and picture above shows all that mess. Personally, I remember almost all Ribbon UI changes and Windows Live brand "refreshes".
There were community attempts to polish interface initiated by Long Zheng, an user experience entrepreneur from Melbourne : Aero and Win7 Taskforce where you could submit all these inconsistencies and provide mockups (if you were able to do so). I'm pretty sure there were people from MS who took this unique feedback into consideration and some suggestions were implemented but with Windows 8 and 10 all these efforts become meaningless.
It’s not only that but it’s also that drivers could ship custom property pages in an accompanying DLL. All using property page / dialog box classic Win32 technology.
So unless you have a locked down device like a phone, you can’t magically port everything over to a new settings app without providing a path for your ISV / IHV ecosystem to migrate to on timelines that are sensible for the business. And ‘drivers’ consists of way more than hardware devices: database access drivers etc etc.
Part of me wonders if an AI model couldn’t just sandbox the old UI and inspect it, and then auto map to a new settings style AI.
One of my favorites is "dialer.exe". I wonder how many have actually made a phone call with it on Windows 11. I'd expect more than 0... just not sure how much more.
Seems they've already changed the text in response to feedback. The quote in this article says:
> The Control Panel is in the process of being deprecated in favor of the Settings app, which offers a more modern and streamlined experience.
Whereas the current text of the linked page on microsoft.com now says:
> Many of the settings in Control Panel are in the process of being migrated to the Settings app, which offers a more modern and streamlined experience.
Thankfully, Linux is getting much better for blind people. Orca has become much more stable, and accessibility is more than an extremely underground movement within desktop environments. Just a bit more, and we'll be ready.
Control panel has a good interface showing both the sections (large) as well as detailed items. If you know what you want you can go to the details directly.
Settings seems to be designed for touch screens that nobody uses. My laptop screen comfortably fits 70 lines of information. Settings gives me 17, less than a Commodore 64 which had 25 lines 40 years ago.
Any bets on how long before a 3rd party tool comes out that provides Control Panel like functionality... a bit like how the Windows 7-like Start Menu is still available for a quick download...
Ok, Microsoft is killing anything that was good about Windows. Don't want to be that guy, but the Settings app in KDE is the best in class and can configure almost every aspect of the desktop environment. Overall, Plasma Desktop is a better Windows experience than Windows itself now.
I'm a Linux user, but used to have a tech support gig for Windows (mostly Windows XP.) On a "loaner" Windows 10 machine, I wanted to add an admin user, and remove the existing user. I couldn't figure out how to do it through the GUI. So, I did it through CLI commands in Powershell. Maybe now I'll be doing the same for whatever I would have previously reached for in the Control Panel.
Though, my latest Android phone has been changing my behavior a bit. It seems every time I get a phone, the UI is way different from the last one. I don't bother trying to find anything in the UI anymore. Instead, the settings search has been working well enough in most cases.
I'm okay with some changes they're going to do as long as there will be proper alternatives. The new app is generally more confusing and less usable but I don't touch either that frequently so it is okay.
My concern is that they're not going to invest into the proper, fully functional alternatives, maybe intentionally. And I suspect they probably want to use this deprecation as an excuse to take the control away from users, similar to other mobile OS. The new setting app lacks many important functionalities and usually redirects to old control panels. And MS can simply remove old control panels without giving us alternatives, or significantly restricted "modern" ones with less controls.
Microsoft would surely do better to build one UX for the normies and improve it rather than do a half baked job on two. The only mystery is why its taken so long. I can understand Microsoft wanting to phase the migration but its been 10+ years since Settings appeared.
If there's a request I would make to Microsoft it would be to expose all the settings, consistently, in a single programmatic way. Powershell would suit me just fine for instance. This idea that powerusers can just unleash on the registry, apart from being an incomplete way to control all the settings, is wild.
> expose all the settings, consistently, in a single programmatic way.
That is the registry. It has an API and everything.
> apart from being an incomplete way to control all the settings
Well, if you want "all the settings," so you have to accept 'all the complexity' that comes with that. A decent example would be VLANs. They offer a very complex configuration surface if you consider all the deployment and standard options combined with the fact that not all cards and drivers implement them in whole or in part.
It's been 10 years or more where I learned to use windows. I haven't used windows since longer than a few minutes.
The control panel is the last thing that was familiar to me. I am sure Powershell works great, but coming from Linux that feels like a badly designed pain not even shipping with a useable terminal.
And don't get me wrong I hatet that control panel. But I was able to get things done without a lot of prior knowledge of the system.
I'd be way happier if they formally deprecated Settings in favor of Control Panel.
MS stumbles upon any good design once per decade and has many times as much of failed experiments. Prefering old stuff is not necessarily nostalgia if you can't make anything good for this long despite trying.
Every other windows is a wholesale failed experiment and forcing it to stay alive is a terrible idea.
I have no idea why they kept Win8 start menu alive in Win10 instead of using the last good one, the one from Win7. They even had it in dev builds of Win10 and it was great.
I think the time taken has less to do with the size of the rewrite and more to do with highlighting Microsoft's level of interest (from a business perspective, not an ideological one) in working on the control panel. E.g. in the same time period Microsoft has migrated and rewritten their enterprise chat platform multiple times across different architectures, frontends, and backends. That's not a point that large rewrites always only take a couple of years, it's a point that they were really interested in evolving their enterprise chat offering.
You start to do a rewrite and then discover that the old design was the right one. But then you double down on those because "metrics" which oddly favors the team/company interests.
For the last 15 years my first task on any new Windows version is to find the real control panel. Often I’m doing this to help someone with tech support on a version I’ve never actually used.
Also cannot change the taskbar icon size anymore either. I always enjoyed small icons + full taskbar button size as it allows one to have a larger target to click and see the window name all at once.
At least they finally re-added the "feature" (after removing it after many years) to expand taskbar titles instead of forcing MacOS-like icons on the taskbar with zero information other than a barely-visible red dot when anything happens, though I don't quite understand why it's sort of hidden inside the Taskbar behaviors list (inside Taskbar settings) which is by default collapsed, whereas Taskbar items and System tray icons are always open (and IMO you don't need to mess with those settings very often, at least compared to the Taskbar behavior settings).
Nice! I didn't realize that was added back. Now I just would like 1.) small taskbar icons and 2.) ability to dock the taskbar on any edge.
Agreed about the macOS dock. I occasionally use macOS as well and it kind of reminds me of a terminal bell in tmux, it just lights up for anything and everything. Windows at least has different colors, solid vs blinking, and even progress bars through the taskbar icon.
Can you even 'Listen to this device' without going into the old Sound Control Panel? Pretty sure you can't.
I use this to pipe audio from other devices (e.g. game consoles) to a device (Roger pen) that transmits audio to my partner's hearing aid, because Windows doesn't have real tools for handling audio.
Oh, what about when something goes wrong with a wireless driver and the only fix is disabling and enabling the device, once again in the old control panel? This happens sometimes when you sleep a Surface Pro 5.
They've been trying to migrate to the new settings for 10+ years and somehow the result is that we have features that are exclusive to the new one and features that are exclusive to the old one.
I wonder if Windows will eventually move to an "image" based approach like macOS has done. When one updates macOS or iOS, you basically download a multi-GB sealed image of the OS and install it in-place.
It does and has since Vista - the Windows install process has basically been a process that creates/formats the partitions, unpacks the files in a .WIM (Windows Image) file to the C:\WINDOWS directory, and configures the boot loader.
This will add another UI style, so of course it will increase the installation size. People need more scattered UI languages, not less!
/s
I wish Windows 7 was usable today, I'd switch back in a heartbeat. The peak of integrated and easy UI/UX on Windows was 7, and it went downwards after that.
It was really funny to me last time I used Windows 11 – I was trying to find the devices system utility which is there from XP version, allowing you to see the connected peripherals, check their drivers, enable/disable them etc.
I spent good 15 minutes clicking on every button in this new settings app, until at the very bottom of it, the "About" section of the settings gives a faint blue link to open "devices".
What is this "About" even about? Does anyone know the logic behind this section's naming and why they put the link to devices dialog exactly there? MS insiders? Would be very interesting to know ;)
The easier way would be to right click the start button. That's been a thing for ages. Second easiest would be to search for devices in the start menu.
But since you rarely use it it's tough to remember in the moment
I guess those settings are still more advanced than in macOS. Nobody seems to complain about that one, and Apple's market share is rising and rising. People vote with their feet, and they aren't voting for Windows.
I think that's just marketing. As a decision maker, I care more what works.
80% of my tech support tickets for desktop help are from my Mac users which are only 8% of my endpoints. In my research, and experience, forcing Windows reduced calls and decreased costs because questions like "how do I send this file to..." and "how do I connect to this server" were eliminated.
Further, SMB doesn't work very well for Mac users. Try opening a network share with hundreds of thousands of images.
And last but surely not least, it's hard to secure company data on Macs because Active Directory integration is also broken. Sure, you use Apple's MDM solution, for added cost, complexity and training.
Anecdotally, I've seen Windows users quickly move to the top of the company while their seniors using Macs stay at the bottom because they constantly have difficulty being part of the team. Problems with sharing files, joining meetings, color schemes and profiles that don't match their counterparts', etc. All these little things add up and make for a difficult career path to advancement when you're constantly the odd one out having problems sharing and showing your work product.
Or, on Windows, I can deal with Google searches to find where a setting has moved to.
I think that's true. For private use, it's fine, except for the added cost. But overall, even there, I don't particularly see the benefit aside from the glamorous appeal.
As an analogy, a Rolex is a great watch. Is it objectively a functionally better time keeping device than a Tissot or most any other time keeping device? Not really. But I'll concede, it looks great and it makes a statement that a lower cost device doesn't make. There is value in that.
It's just that, for me, that justification doesn't weigh against practicality when considering the importance of a tool so critical to one's success and happiness in the modern world.
I was a big Apple fan in the 90s when Apple's Motorola chips really did have a big advantage in productivity for graphics and video production, and even just raw computational prowess. Especially when coupled with the superior UX of OS 7 compared with the competition of the time. But, the modern hardware and software landscape is very different.
I try to be objective enough to embrace the best utilitarian solution, regardless of brand or marketing. And, if I care about looks, Asus, for many years, was using the same manufacturer that Apple was. They were even sued over the similarities. Even today, several brands make Windows and Linux purposed hardware that meets or exceeds the optical appeal of Apple devices.
I think Windows today fulfills the need for both personal and enterprise computing, while Linux fills the need for privacy and professional tech development. And each one does so in that respective category separately better than Apple does in either one. And that's considering all the flaws and glaring shortcomings and long running issues of both Windows and Linux (referring to desktop usage only), sadly.
I'm guessing it's formally deprecated in the exact same way CMD.exe was deprecated in favor of PowerShell. I expect another 30 years before someone actually guts it from the OS.
May finally have to give up windows for good. I mean I haven't done any real work on windows since mac went to osx .. it's basically just a game console at this point anyways.
Valve's done a LOT of good for moving the ball on Windows things just working (mostly) on Linux. Usually it's some form of DRM or video playback that doesn't work... for obvious reasons.
I finally started running Linux as my main (and only) OS after hating what Microsoft has done with 11. I'm not a Microsoft hater, and while I like Linux I'm not the type of person to play with new distros everyday or heavily customize my system.
They finally did it. It works. I can just install Steam and play Hunt: Showdown and join a discord call. It's all I really wanted.
In fact every game I want to play works out of the box, and there's dozens across various genres. For an example list: Guild Wars 2, Stellaris, Crusader Kings 3, Counter-Strike 2, Dota 2, Baldurs Gate 3, Sea of Thieves, Halo Infinite are just some of the games I've been playing recently.
Hunt recently shipped a major update and it broke Proton support. Within a day Valve fixed it and it now works fine.
Somehow I suspect this means fixing some problems will require finding out how to launch the old settings pages that are still there, but no longer easily accessible.
ChatGPT is so good at telling you how to configure something, that you should be able to tell windows what you want to do, and it should do it for you.
I was just thinking a couple of weeks ago how the new settings app is basically a bunch of text. Personally, I find it hard to navigate compared to colorful, differentiated icons.
The whole point of icons - to encapsulate meaning efficiently - seems to have disappeared from modern UI. Flat lists of text are fundamentally what we had in the early 90s before advanced CUIs and GUIs took over.
Wish Apple would deprecate the macOS System Settings app!
So clunky and slow in recent versions, it’s the only app that can make the latest M3 hardware feel underpowered and laggy. Yet still suffers from age-old problems like not being able to resize it’s window freely, which would at least help alleviate some of the UI weaknesses.
Older versions prior to recent redesign/“improvements” were actually better…
It can be resized vertically, but the UI is lay out in a way that it doesn't make sense to resize it horizontally (not saying that I like that UI layout, but it has got a reason for the limitation).
I wish windows fixed it's registry. Documented where different settings are in the registry. And also streamlined the registry to be a lot more intuitive.
UIs will build themselves around a simplified registry.
It's really mind boggling. Who at MSFT looks at the new settings app and thinks, yeah that's much better than the old one? Are they all high? Do they all have their own admin and never configure anything themselves? Do they even use Windows?
Microsoft should open source Windows 2000 and let the community patch it up to make it secure for 2024. That was the peak of UI. We've never been able to reach that summit since then, on any OS, on any device.
I much prefer the old Control Panel myself, but I think it's even worse to have two system programs for doing the same thing. Maybe now they will finally have to improve their modern Settings app.
The amount of clicking around I have to do on the Settings window to get find where the hell things are is infuriating. Of course the search feature is just useless. I resort to Control Panel to just get most shit done. God forbid I need yo check a setting on another page and I forget how I even ended up on the page I needed.
Yep, now's the time to move to linux. Microsoft has gone bonkers and is going to inflict a lot of unnecessary pain and frustration on people before they correct course, if they ever do.
To be fair XP was already digging it's grave while it existed. In my school time computer viruses were a legit excuse to not bring your homework that day because it was so blatant.
Only switching to Linux could give you that peace of a actually working computer.
I swear, MS kills all the useful features in Windows.
For comparison, configuring a network interface using Control Panel is simple, straight forward and allows me to change all the settings I want. Trying to do the same thing using the Settings app is complex, it hides pretty nuch all of the advanced settings that you want to see or change. And on top of that, it doesn’t even show you how long that interface has been connected to the network and how much data was transferred both ways: incredible debugging info lost.
Oh, and the fact that you can’t tick which updates you want and which you don’t…
I’m pretty sure others have other gripes with the “streamlined experience”.
I’m a little split on it. I don’t actually mind their streamlining because of the way I windows. Which is professionally and for video games. I wouldn’t use windows professionally if I had a choice (company policy, and one I get from an ops perspective), but at least every setting is taken care for me. I wouldn’t really use windows for video games either, but the fact that they are removing more and more of the “use windows” part means that my only windows machine is basically just a console at this point with how little I have to interact with it.
I do understand where you’re coming from. Which is the flip side of it, but what I don’t understand is why anyone really wants to use Windows in 2024. I’m not a huge fan of the direction Apple is going with their continuous platform lockin, but the smallest MacBook Air is cheap and works better than anything that runs windows. Similarly Chromebooks are actually just fine, ok maybe not outside the context of windows/macos/chromeos. I chose the Apple lock-in because my families likes iOS, but I would have been fine with Google.
If you like to tinker and own your OS there is still Linux.
Professionally I think Microsoft is doing fine. They have a functional monopoly on enterprise organisations, especially the 99% (citation = made up) which aren’t tech related. So it’s probably a decent enough strategy for them. Hell, I think the primary reason they don’t have a cheap device to compete with MacBook airs and Chromebooks is because they know windows would lose.
> what I don’t understand is why anyone really wants to use Windows in 2024.
Because I'm Windows power user (30+ years of experience) and novice on MacOS and Linux? Doesn't that count for something? It's not that alternative OSes are terrible, they're just terrible for me. I use shortcuts without thinking, I use TotalCommander all the time and no, there are no 100% replacements that I can just install and continue using with all shortcuts I'm used to. I use Home/End/PgDown/PgUp all the time, and not only that MacBook doesn't have these, it doesn't even have Delete key (opposite of backspace), which I find mind-boggling.
Sorry about little rant. I'm sure people are very productive using MacOS or Linux. But I'm super productive on Windows, everything just flies without thinking. Oh, btw. I'm typing this on MacBook which is a wonderful piece of hardware, and I use it a lot, but even after a year I feel like my hands are tied behind my back when working on it.
I think it's ok for a guy to have his preferences without been judged by his fellow developers. I though we're behind judging for personal preferences in 2024?
The issue with that argument is Windows keeps depreciating existing functionality so old experience is worthless fairly quickly. Nobody has decades of expertise with Windows 11, at this point with how little Windows 3.11 experience still applies. Remember .ini files? Yea how relevant is that today? How about using a DOS prompt recently?
Also: it's hardly improved significantly over the past 25 years! It's as rubbish as ever. If attempting to make the argument that Windows is changing stuff all the time, the command prompt really is the oddest thing to point at.
systems evolve. systemd is nearly fifteen years old and is not hard to use, and it is better than the myriad systems it replaced. that's why it won
this is very much not the same thing especially since you can still find non systemd distros but really, systemd is neither a new nor abrupt nor unilateral change
Linux is not "doing the same thing" except inasmuch that everything that doesn't die changes over time
Remember .ini files? Yea how relevant is that today?
AFAIK there's nothing stopping you from writing software that pulls config info from an ini file. Has something changed?
Edit: I think I've edited ini files to configure video games somewhat recently.
How about using a DOS prompt recently?
I host my command prompt inside a 3rd party program, but I still use the Windows command prompt all the time. I think that's pretty normal for "power users" who haven't moved on to PowerShell (I use PS when I have to, but it's not my go-to).
> writing software that pulls config info from an ini file.
You can write a Linux program that pulls from an INI file or a 3rd party DOS program on MacOS, the question is how this stuff is relevant to being a power Windows user.
You can write a Linux program that pulls from an INI file
What's the API for that look like? In Win32 it's GetPrivateProfileString.
the question is how this stuff is relevant to being a power Windows user.
I gave you an example. I guess you're not aware that many desktop applications continue to support ini files, even if it's not the first line of configuration anymore.
I am well aware of INI files being used by applications on several operating systems. DotNet Core may not be the most popular platform but it’s blurred the lines here.
DOS has similarly been stripped from Windows but 3rd party DOS shells exist on many platforms. Honestly knowing Bash is more Windows specific at this point than DOS. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install
So again, none of your examples are Windows specific at this point.
DOS has similarly been stripped from Windows but 3rd party DOS shells exist on many platforms
Huh? DOS != Command line interpreter or shell. DOS per se hasn't existed for decades, but the command line (Command Prompt) lives on, using pretty much the same syntax.
Honestly knowing Bash is more Windows specific at this point than DOS.
Bash is more Windows-specific than "DOS"?! That makes no sense whatsoever.
I am well aware of INI files being used by applications on several operating systems.
What are you even talking about now? You started the whole ini discussion with "Remember .ini files? Yea how relevant is that today?" So it went from irrelevant to relevant across platforms?
On windows 11 using Microsoft only tools you can list every file in a directory using ls or dir. But Bash is by far a more powerful tool than command prompt making it far more relevant for a power user than some legacy syntax.
> So it went from irrelevant to relevant across platforms?
The point INI files and DOS come up but aren’t some Windows specific knowledge at this point.
> I use Home/End/PgDown/PgUp all the time, and not only that MacBook doesn't have these, it doesn't even have Delete key (opposite of backspace), which I find mind-boggling
Fn + Delete, deletes forwards
Command + arrow keys moves cursor to beginning/end of paragraph/doc. Option jumps by word. And you can combine them with Shift for selection.
Spacebar scrolls a full page.
If you want the actual Home/End/PgDown/PgUp you can get them by combining Fn with arrow or F keys, depending on your keyboard, but I never use them.
I said I'm MacOs novice, but I'm not that green, of course I immediately searched for shortcuts. And these are not a replacement for a single key, especially since I'm often combining these keys with Ctrl and Shift. At least on Windows where I'm doing real productive work.
What if you plug lets say typical Logitech external keyboard, MacOS literally doesn't support those functionalities? (Windows guy for 30 years too without any Apple experience, the productivity I can get on filesystem stuff just with Total commander compared to literally everybody else in the office is quite something)
Apple's own external keyboard has these missing keys, so I assume they work as on Windows. But they're not available on MacBook keyboard. Truth to be told, Home/End/PgUp/PgDown are also not available on many new Win laptops, but at least separate Delete is always there. And there"s choice, you can always pick up ThinkPad if it's important.
That was just one example of why I don't feel at home on Mac. But TotalCommander must be #1 thing I miss. I investigated several Mac file managers, settled for Crax Commander, but I'm so spoilled by TC that nothing comes close.
Same, I have been on Windows for over two decades. Now I'm migrating away. M$ pretty much broke every good things that were rock solid before.Just like you, there are something I don't have an alternative yet, so still have to hang on a bit, but I feel I might just have to bite the bullet and ditch it.
I can sort of understand this sentiment. I question how much of that experience translates past 10 years or so. There is also the issue of windows simply being wildly unstable for me. I am also a long time windows user. Every 6 months or so my windows install destroys itself. I've never had this happen on my Mac & Linux has not failed me like this in over ten years. At this point, I only use windows to play games with old friends, and it still manages to self destruct with minimal software installed.
I have the exact same experience with the Linux desktop. At some random point, it simply caves into itself and something very trivial such as sound or Bluetooth simply breaks beyond repair. It's happened so many times that I've stopped trying it. "A Linux evening" is no longer fun or interesting to me.
Incidentally, my Windows installations never self destruct, and I have used the product on several versions in the last 25+ years (since W95). My Linux installations however have, for example by standard updates.
Because I manage Windows based servers that run various business applications. And as it happens, when things go wrong, you want to be able to see all settings and options, not just three options that don’t help you. And don’t even get me stared about netsh…
I failed to mention in the initial comment that I am refferring to Windows Server, but I got triggered by “we’re removing the lasr useful bits of Windows configuration options”.
Windows Server 2016 onwards: updates are all or nothing.
The default is the new settings app and you have to be very persistent if you want Control Panel options. Everything is oversimplified and dumbed down.
My example with network settings: Removing useful admin info for no
reason.
The assertion that Linux needs tinkering to use is absurd. Fedora, for example, works great out of the box. Some people may choose to change a few settings in a GUI but that isn't tinkering in the way that I think that you mean it and it certainly isn't unique to Linux.
I use Linux mint at home. It usually works great, but it definitely needs tinkering to keep the system working.
Just in the last few months:
- My nvidia drivers stopped working because the drivers I had (which didn’t auto update) apparently weren’t kept up to date with the kernel (which had auto updates enabled).
- My computer wouldn’t boot at all last week after I disconnected an external usb drive running zfs. It showed the logo and just kind of stalled out. I had to use a recovery grub setting to disable zfs from the boot process.
This sort of routine breakage is pretty common. My rodecaster doesn’t have all its audio interfaces show up in the default audio devices list. HDMI audio broke last year from a kernel update. IntelliJ stopped scaling according to the HiDPI mode I have set up. And so on. It’s fine. It’s worth it for me. But it’s definitely less reliable than macOS or windows.
I wonder how many developers at Red hat or Canonical actually "dogfood" their OSes at stock desktop configuration, instead of immediately going the "pro" route of basically using a custom kernel, disabling autoupdates, using a barebone DE, removing Pulseaudio / Wayland etc.
I've seen posts like yours a million times, and they can always be summed up as "no mantainer actually uses the default setup for more than a few hours before removing anything that could cause a conflict between nominally unrelated packages".
Maybe you are using the incorrect distro model for you and would benefit of a slower release distro?
I am fine with fedora on my main and professional laptop because they are used almost daily and then are kept updated regularly. And honestly I had one small breakage in 10 years and I could just boot with the previously installed kernel for a week until the problem was fixed so it wasn't that big of a deal.
I have another computer that serve as a streaming box in my leaving room connected to my video projector. I use this one much less frequently, especially in summer so I don't want to have to spend a lot of time doing updates. For this one I decided to install almalinux. Since it is a very long term support distro it only receive security updates and major bug fixes so it is very reliable, the kernel version is well tested and the frequency of system update is very low.
In the past, people would have complained these distro were lacking important newer versions for their own usage and needs. This is not an issue anymore with flatpaks, container tools, distrobox, VMs + that trend of dev/devopa software installed on your homedir directly via curl | bash or some versions manager like nvm, sdkman, pyenv. Nowadays you can use the very latest versions of software on top of a dinosaur.
Maybe. But personally, I hate running all my actual software in docker or a VM. It chews through drive space, slows down IO, and it makes sharing files around a headache. (Like, run tool X on directory Y - oh, oops - the tool and the data are in different containers. Ugh what was the command to fix that?).
I'd much rather a "native" linux distro that has a reasonably modern kernel, with support for io_uring and recent nvidia drivers. And I want a good, modern window manager with hidpi support. And I need to be able to install modern compilers, toolchains and software - like rustc, intellij, nodejs, spotify, firefox, davinci resolve, zfs, automatic1111 and so on.
Maybe these problems wouldn't show up as much with another distro? But if I spend time distro shopping to avoid tinkering with mint, I'm worried I'll end up wasting more time doing that than I would save. Most of the bugs I've run into with mint are actually bugs in ubuntu, that mint is based on. Is fedora / arch / etc really more stable than ubuntu? If I use a dinosaur, I'm worried I'll then need to work around its issues - can I easily install modern lldb on an old distro with an ancient glibc? I've tried that before, and it was a huge headache.
> Is fedora / arch / etc really more stable than ubuntu?
Can't give you a definite answer on that, I am quite happy with Fedora but only using ZFS on my almalinux and freebsd system and my only experience with Ubuntu in recent years were LTS releases on servers and that was pre v20.
I remember that the kernel changed something a few years ago that broke openzfs and it took time to get back support on some distros so I would be afraid the kernel break something and force me to avoid kernel security upgrades while it is worked on if I was relying on it on a Fedora.
I believe running nvidia hardware and ZFS, or anything that is not using a driver included in the mainline kernel, is unsuitable for a distro running fairly recent kernels if you care about potential breakage. That is what LTS distro are for.
One alternative to super bleeding edge distro such as Arch is to use something like opensuse slowroll which is a kind of hybrid model between standard and rolling release. Every month or so it gets an upgrade to the lastest snapshot from the OpenSuse Tumbleweed rolling release and between each snapshot it only gets security updates correcting major bugs or CVEs. I only have used it for a few weeks in a VM but I guess if a major breakage would impact tumbleweed you would continue getting security updates until tumbleweed is fixed. But I have no idea if OpenSuse is an openzfs friendly shop, I think they are full on btrfs adoption instead.
> If I use a dinosaur, I'm worried I'll then need to work around its issues - can I easily install modern lldb on an old distro with an ancient glibc? I've tried that before, and it was a huge headache.
When I say a dinosaur, I was exagerating. For example all the toolchains and software you mention in your posts are perfectly usable on a long term distro such as almalinux 9. I can't speak about nvidia because I don't have any machine with it but Almalinux is a better proposal for openzfs. Nodejs is easily installed through nvm, I am using the most recent firefox, librewolf and ungoogled chrommum from the flatpaks, etc. It is not using an old glibc.
On my works laptop I had initially kept the corporate windows install on the original drive and installed Fedora on a second non drive.
I would fire up the windows machine once every other week for a few hours so it gets its updates. But every single time I would enter the firmware settings or boot Fedora the OS bootlocker would lock itself and force me to go to https://aka.ms/recoverykey to get a recovery key the next time I booted windows. Until one day it started not booting even after giving the correct key. Bitlocker basically bricked itself.
So don't tell me that windows is more usable. And this is even without tackling the non functionning parts of windows when it accepts to boot, like the broken keyboard for anyone not using english language that Microsoft never even tried to fix in more than 30 years. People used to laugh about a sliding date for linux to be "read for thr desktop" but windows has never been ready either.
I've spent more hours over the past decade wrestling with Windows than with Linux. So not only is Windows costing me money to license it, it's also costing me more time than chucking it in the bin and using Linux. I'm so done with Windows.
A licensed copy of the most feature-packed Windows Server Datacenter edition will run you ~$6k (16 core license).
Now, assume your hourly consulting rate is $200. You would only have to spend about 40 hours of time tinkering on linux before windows would have made more sense for the time/money equation.
Frustration is another economy that I think is even more important for getting things done. How badly do you actually want to build? Maintaining morale through the hard bits of the target problem domain is usually already a struggle. Why do you want to be fighting with boot loaders, drivers and arguments on various forums on top of all of that?
I agree. But to continue the point - even if I wanted to spend 40 gross hours of billable time at $200/hr for a single installation of a server OS, that doesn't necessarily mean that it's the right OS for the goal I'm trying to accomplish, no matter how bad or excellent the configuration experience happens to be.
Conversations about the utility, costs, and feature sets of Windows vs. Linux. vs. macOS tend to ignore the reality that business conditions often dictate that you must use one or the other for a given use case. Sometimes you do have the option, and if you've already got an appreciable investment in one, then you tend to select for that one almost by default.
I agree with your sentiment and I use Linux religiously too. Respect it for what it has accomplished and continues to. Most of my friends don't care. They're into productivity more than passion for computing in general. They don't care one way or another. Tomorrow if there's another proprietary OS that makes their work easier they'll easily pay for that OS and move on. Just saying that our sentiment isn't shared by everyone.
Meh, this looks like a YMMV kinda situation. I never had to "tinker" with anything since I installed Arch on the machine on which I'm typing this, almost four years ago.
Last week I reinstalled Windows on my work machine because the TPM was reset because I opened the case and all the MS account thingies got borked beyond repair.
Now there are a bunch of borken things. Like icons randomly disappearing in the taskbar (the button is still there and functional, but no icon). And every other time I boot it, something messes up the input language settings. It gets set to US English, although that layout doesn't show up in the enabled languages in the settings app. I have to add it and remove it to unbreak this.
And then there's my gaming box, which worked OK for a few months, but now something happened with the BitLocker screen and there's no more text, just the blue screen. If I type in my pin, it actually works.
There's a thousand of graphical frontend installer for Arch and Arch-derivatives, like cachyOS, endeavour, etc. Hell, it even has an archinstall script nowadays.
I installed it a couple times by hand for fun but if you want a rolling-release Linux distro that uses pacman there are many ways as easy as Ubuntu
I spent a solid 2 days trying to get Ubuntu Server working on a WRX80 threadripper machine. Never once saw the actual installation process.
Day 3, I grab an image of windows server 2022. It boots instantly to the install process and just works.
I know you can make Linux work, but the amount of suffering is still unbelievable compared to the alternatives in many cases. By the time I get the Linux thing figured out, I'll have forgotten about what it was I wanted to originally build.
I wouldn't mind a bit of tinkering, but this is sad. I happily pay Microsoft if this is the alternative.
The double standards when discussing Linux are ridiculous, every issue people have with Linux must be because they're incompetent and using windows must mean you're fighting the OS every second
I wonder if Linux advocates could take a small amount of ownership over the user/customer experience instead of projecting all flaws upon the user. It's an operating system. Most people aren't interested in making it their hobby or full time job.
Not sure what hardware you are doing this on, but installing Fedora 40 on my mid-range gaming PC from 2022 last month got me flickering windows (it only ships with a Wayland session) and broken sound out of the box. My screens still don't both turn on when I wake it up from sleep, if it does.
If that is outside of "absurd" to you then the Linux desktop world clearly needs to keep cooking a little longer. My non-IT friends would not have been able to figure this out and I don't think they should have to.
Up until a year or so ago, windows wouldn’t recognize the webcam of my hp-recommends-windows laptop.
On a different laptop, it refused to output 4k@60 through the HP dock. After it started working, waking from sleep would be a coin toss whether I would get any image at all, or something garbled.
I’m “IT” and had no idea how to fix these. Even installing all the provided oem drivers made no difference.
A new development is Windows using the us English layout, although it’s not enabled. I have to add and remove it to fix it.
Windows machines have the benefit of official Windows support where the integrator worked out the kinks and built-in a bunch of hacks to fix whatever half-broken things the manufacturer cobbled together. Linux machines don't usually have such affordances, you just install it on a random _Windows_ machine and hope it works. It's actually amazing it works well 90% of the time.
I have to disagree to a limited extent. I recently tried to boot multiple current Linux distros from a USB stick for evaluation and all of them had issues. Fedora wasn't usable at all due to lack of space because it lost the RAM partition in the boot process and had severe graphical glitches. Ubuntu had issues with the Intel iGPU and installing drivers for the dGPU isn't possible in a live boot without persistence (and Ubuntu showed a blank error message when using the GUI for switching drivers). It also somehow managed to trigger secure boot so that I had to use a recovery key to get my data back. Zorin can download Nvidia drivers during boot and thus worked decently but the system would randomly freeze and had graphical artifacts when using the desktop cube. There were also other issues on Ubuntu and Zorin like with the permissions for bubble wrap to make Flatpaks work and so on. If it already requires tinkering before installing or with a completely fresh OS, then I find it hard to believe that desktop Linux can be a daily driver.
Nah, give me a freshly installed Windows 11, I can be productive and start actually working on things within five minutes. Give me any Linux distribution, not without an hour.
I say this as a professional software engineer who works on a Linux VM 8 hours a day plus off work.
I used to feel this way but having installed Ubuntu on a friend's old laptop for him, it's crazy the amount of stuff you forget you do because it's second nature. I certainly think it's too far to say "absurd".
It really depends on what hardware you are working with.
HiDPI support is more than a bit sketchy still, especially on nvidia, and especially if you attach multiple screens to the computer and don't want all of them to have the same scaling.
Webcam support is also still quite sketchy. It'll work, but actually configuring the thing to e.g. select the resolution or adjust the white balance, feels like a regression to 2004.
Installing codecs, drivers (several times by different guides usually) and disabling Red Hat telemetry from command line is what user have to do to make it usable for something more than running neofetch
Since we are comparing to Windows, the "disabling Red Hat telemetry from command line" step doesn't really count, since Windows out of the box is loaded with telemetry.
Windows is practically spyware now, all they're doing with the platform is enshittification. WSL was the last "good" windows feature and it's just an Embrace Extend Extinguish play.
> the smallest MacBook Air is cheap and works better than anything that runs windows.
The casual computer experience on Apple is absolutely unbeatable. It's not even close. I can't stand to do anything even remotely technical on these machines though.
I spend about 50/50 time on windows and apple these days. Windows for work/building & MacOS/iOS for entertainment, personal notes, kitchen internet appliance, socializing, HN, etc. I actually don't like to use HN on my windows PC (on iPhone right now).
I like the mental separation between the two. I can feel my blood pressure drop when I move from my sweaty nerd workstation to my MacBook or iPhone.
It’s always interesting to know other people’s method of separation. Im the complete opposite, but for the same reasons.
Windows is a toy for me, its not a tool I’d ever willing use for productivity or business, that’s left to OSX, Linux etc.
It just helps to not cross the streams, which when your job is computing and your hobbies involve computing helps, or at least I feel it does. I can’t use a nix os without it feeling like my day job.
Ironically when I worked in PC repair, it was the other way around, I couldn’t bare to look at windows when I got home.
Thanks for admitting you made up that statistic. Microsoft's hegemony is challenged in some areas, with Google Workspace being a credible threat. Microsoft is still dominant in some regions, but Google's made significant inroads. $16 billion to $64 billion, which works out to be 75%.
As far as devices, Microsoft makes the Surface. The fact that you didn't mention it speaks volumes about how successful it has been.
"Nobody got fired for choosing IBM." It's not about being tech savvy or not, it's about self preservation and career advancements.
If you're tech savvy and push for FOSS in your org then you're the one on the hook whenever that SW fails or some coworker gets it to fail because now it's YOUR responsibility. But if MS Office fails than it's not your fault, it's Microsoft's, or Crowdstrike's, or whatever $BIG_CORP you bought it from.
Most people want a chill 9-5 and aren't willing to die on that hill for the sake of pushing FOSS religiousness. Martyrism isn't rewarded. You want something where you can outsource the risk to away from you, so that you can always go home early.
Why do you think Google uses SAP. Do you think they can't develop their own alternative on site? But why bother?
The main gripe is they seem to think we use it on a touch interface for tablet, so it makes no sense visually on desktop
The second gripe is they seem to add features to it whenever they change something in windows, so older stuff that doesn't change because it doesn't need to is not in it
Many companies have basically reached perfection (or at least as good as it's going to get), but they still need to justify their existence. Another example of this is Osprey backpacks. If you bought one in the last couple of decades then it's basically all the same. But what they do is keep churning out new designs year on year, all 90% the same but they wiggle around that line of perfection ensuring some years have something good but also something bad that they can improve on next time (despite the fact the "improvement" is just from the design of 3 years back). This has been Microsoft's model also for a long time now.
The way I see it is that windows is infrastructure, it is a stage that other applications perform on (similar with the browser) but otherwise needs to stay in the background and their roadies be unnoticed.
The trouble is there's an implied maintenance contract as the environment the software exists in only gets more hostile even if your consumer customers rarely pay for it with new licenses. Plus an expectation that you upgrade their facilities/APIs to facilitate new tech other companies have come up with in the ecosystem that gives their 'stage' value, that HDR lighting rig they want to use for their performance or new USB/networking/3D rendering/etc standard.
Cannot agree more. I actually run into much worse scenarios with network config on Windows 11 before. Could not set DNS manually with settings app. Had to turned to control panel, but again, could not set IP address manually. Tried to use command line, broken too. Eventually had to combine the 3 and spent hours to complete a simply task should have been finished in 30 seconds. For sure, that's really great experience.
I think that Microsoft is extremely short-sighted here. They're clearly pursuing next quarter growth. They're turning away from people who are willing to be the first adopters and free marketers. Therefore, those people will indeed turn away, adopt something else, and then start convincing everyone else to go along with them.
Of course it will take a while because Linux is still a complete mess on desktop, but the number of people willing to put their time into making it work slowly but steadily keeps increasing.
As someone who recently switched to PopOS, it's actually very stable and feels like Windows 7. Fast and simple. Nowadays most games and the Microsoft office suite also run in Wine.
Every time someone criticizes the state of Linux desktop as an overall experience being generally troublesome for the average consumer discussions always devolve down to anecdotes that only serve as proof that tech savvy people who are willing to either push through the issues or find alternatives did so, therefore the same experience is valid for those who didn't, making it sound like a "skill issue" and not a "desktop experience issue".
I would argue that, outside of clicking some folders and adding/deleting stuff, the skills required to make ANY desktop experience useful should be as low as possible. Example: I convinced a fellow gamer to give Ubuntu a try, and I helped him with the dual booting process. Then he realized that his framerates feel janky, due to issues with Wayland and vrr. His display had light surfaces flicker while gaming and, while we managed to make Final Fantasy 14 playable, we faced jarring mouse cursor movement when the framerates dipped, which didn't exist on Windows.
While reading this message I'm sure some people will feel an urge to say "oh that's just the monitor that's faulty", "that's just KDE and how it handles mouse movement", and they always miss the point: Just like a teacher doesn't care if a dog ate a homework, and the ISP customer if it was raining, the end user doesn't care if it's Wayland, KDE, Ubuntu or whatever. All they care about was "getting IT done", they couldn't, and now they have to accept a workaround solution or just go back to what they always used fine.
Part of the reason why is that, there's no focused effort towards a small amount of directions, and there's lots of opinion on who can do it better, even the definition of better. Since we're mostly developers, it's akin to working with .NET versus working with nodeJS. The fragmentation is inherent to the system, and the target audience loves it, even at the cost of the end user.
Completely agree, but I think that as Windows becomes worse and worse, there's going to be more push to make Linux usable by an average person. Especially considering the migration of apps from native to web. This is going to take a lot of time though.
I think the biggest difference is that people buy Windows (and Mac OS) preinstalled, but install Linux distros themselves.
Do people experience these issues on a Steam Deck or running Pop OS on System 76 hardware, etc?
The other thing I wonder about is (looking at the problems people are talking about here) whether Windows is any better. Windows can need a lot of fixing.
Since about a year ago I've been using wayland on two systems, 3d/gaming performance is great. That said, afaik VRR support is half-baked on Linux, so I wouldn't count on it for now. Also, if OP used nVidia GPUs then it could be a source of issues since it's a big no no with Wayland for now. People on the bleeding edge have access to new enough drivers that fixes most of these issues, so in time things will stabilize.
I had been somewhat comfortable with the older `netsh` commands from Windows 7. The PowerShell commands are overall richer for being consistent and composable if you're already comfortable with PS, but it does require a learning investment.
My general sentiment is that I am frustrated with tech companies imposing UIs on users. Some examples:
Duolingo changed its interface to this new "learning path" that took choices away from users.
Garmin updated its Connect app with a new UI that (I subjectively feel) shows less information and forces unnecessary compromises.
Microsoft has been messing with the Control Panel for years. The new UI is missing a lot of settings. I don't agree with the Ars article that you only need the legacy Control Panel for esoteric features: I never figured out how to set a Static IP Address in the new Settings app, which is hardly unusual for servers.
I trust it is possible to set a Static IP in the new UI, but I still feel like these changes are unnecessary and unwelcome.
Anyways, I do hope the PowerShell commands will remain stable for the next 20 years.
Each network card configuration dialogue has a box for "default gateway". As a result an entire generation of people have some very strange ideas about how routing works for a host with more than one network interface. That UI has persisted since at least Win 95 and Win NT.
On the topic of network settings, in Windows 11, the Settings app and Control Panel can actually end up conflicting if you mess with both.
A while back I was messing with IPv6, trying to get it to work my desktop the way I wanted it to, and ended up in a situation where I needed to change both settings that existed only in the new Settings app and settings that existed only in Control Panel, and after a while the Settings app just started throwing an error when trying to save IP settings. The entire thing is a mess.
I echo your sentiment in these regards. It is much easier to do certain tasks in Control Panel (Networking and Power Options being the two biggest examples of this in my opinion), while other things are easier in Settings.
I think the real problem is that Microsoft hasn't place enough focus on getting the Settings app correct from a UI/UX perspective like Apple did with their Settings app. There's nothing technical preventing them from offering a streamlined experience in Settings that allows you to easily configure advanced settings when necessary. It's just design effort on their part.
If they can get their Settings app to the point where nobody wants to use Control Panel anymore, then that's the right time to deprecate it.
Microsoft can’t get any lesson from Apple and its own switch because the fundamental strategy is different.
Apple completely changed its app in one go. There was no plan B, no deprecation. For this reason, the app is not has pristine as it should, with a ton of sections simply brought over without changes.
Microsoft being Microsoft, they’ve chosen to inflict decades of juggling two apps on their users, with poor results.
>I’m pretty sure others have other gripes with the “streamlined experience”.
A simple thing I find infuriating is that the entire 'app' is a singleton. I can't have one window open in one submenu with another window in another submenu, despite no direct relation.
Every OS I regularly lose seems to have lost track of the value of multitasking. Perhaps a side effect of them being treated as a tool to launch a browser.
...maybe because you are used to it, but this process has confused me since I was 14. My eyes go blank and I just hammer out the inside-out learned clicks to get to that final screen. Compare this to the MacOS flow: Settings -> Network -> Port -> Details...
It looks like the Windows 11 flow is similar to MacOS.
As always, Windows problem is that they keep interfaces unchanged until they're completely outdated. Then they completely replace them with new ones, nullifying the users experience with the old ones. They instead should gradually update components so that users have time to adapt.
> it doesn’t even show you how long that interface has been connected to the network and how much data was transferred both ways
What sort of fancy configs do you have going on? What do you need to change in the network settings? Why aren't you using DHCP options? You need a static Windows 10/11 IP address?
I just don't get why you need to fuck with the networking on a device that is almost 100% getting DHCP. If you feel the need to mess with the network settings in Windows, you're kind of doing it wrong.
If you're going to have the l33t M$ sucks attitude, learn to set up your network properly and it's not an issue.
There's plenty of valid reasons to configure a static IP address, I'd say I do it weekly. Configuring a commonly used machine to be static for ease of use. Connecting a TCP communication device (barcode reader, RFID reader, etc.) direct to your computer for testing. Just as a couple examples.
Yeah and you can still make a static IP with Windows 11. This is bullshit M$ whining. Shit changes. Explain to me why Debian fucking around with "ip" is less destructive.
Classic "I've a nail so everyone will have nails and all they need is a hammer" attitude. Not everyone will use DHCP. Static IP is a thing for a reason. I use it on servers, Wi-Fi printers (for mobiles to immediately pick them up), IP packet logging/bucketizing based on client, etc. There's a lot of spheres in computing other than the end-user one which is just the final tip of the iceberg.
Everyone knows gpedit.msc is the real Control Panel. /s
I'm not surprised to see all the negative reactions. The old stuff was pure Win32 and thus very efficient in many ways. The new stuff is all UWP from what I understand (and UWP is itself supposedly deprecrated for several years now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28932345), and much more abstracted and inefficient despite still being native code(?)
I still remember the first time I opened Settings and saw a loading screen, which spent over a second to load a UI that somehow looks even less complete than the one in Windows 1.0, on a system with several orders of magnitude faster CPU and more RAM:
I HATE the "Settings" crap. It's horrible. Fucking mess find anything. Half the functionality of the control panel applets are still not implemented. You essentially can't do more than one settings task at a time.
I seriously want to stab whoever thought this was a good idea on the face.
Everyone in MS consider it a amazing, awesome innovation that makes most popular OS in the world even more intuitive and user friendly. If someone (non-FTE) suddenly not thinking this obvious way, he is better to shut up, or he is not going to work in MS starting next financial quarter.
I have no idea why things turned out this way, and I remember how with every other major OS release Microsoft promises a brand new rewrite, and yet if you dig deep enough you probably can find some UI from Win3.1 era.