10 ms·

This issue is way overblown here on HN. In day-to-day usage, I have rarely been annoyed by these "inconsistencies". The best example to illustrate this articl

This issue is way overblown here on HN. In day-to-day usage, I have rarely been annoyed by these "inconsistencies". The best example to illustrate this article is: Installing a driver with the Windows XP layer. That's probably something that will only happen to people installing very old hardware with drivers from over 10 years ago. I consider that a backward compatibility win: It is great that it even works in Windows 10.

jolux 5y ago
As a primary macOS user who has also done professional Windows development, I am simultaneously blown away by the quality of the development environments and tools (PowerShell! C#! .NET! Visual Studio!) available on Windows and more or less disgusted with the inconsistency in using the operating system itself. It doesn’t feel like Microsoft has had a consistent vision for how their UI is supposed to work for longer than five years at a time, if that. Sure, it’s only an annoyance, but why the hell is it a problem in the first place? I can only conclude either that they do not see it as a problem, or that they are incapable of fixing it. I was a Windows user until 2014. Every time I think about switching back (mostly because WSL is so good) I have to think about putting up with the terrible UI.
- qball 5y ago
  >I can only conclude either that they do not see it as a problem, or that they are incapable of fixing it. They really shot themselves in the foot 10 years ago when they decided to go all-in on making their desktop and server OSes a giant advertisement for their tablets. Which nobody bought, of course. Didn't help that it took them 4 years to get up to feature parity with what you could do on iOS and Android out of the box (like support for SQLite) or that the sandboxed nature of WinRT/UWP meant that you had to jump through a bunch of extra hoops if you so much dared to save a file to the local machine. They just haven't recovered from that, have had zero incentive to improve, and it shows (MS lost the mobile OS war just as hard as IBM lost the desktop OS war); workplaces are going to buy licenses no matter what, and home users only got the ability to pass through a subset of consumer-level nVidia GPUs (which IIRC doesn't apply to laptops, so you're still stuck there) to a Windows guest VM thanks to a recent driver hack, and that's only for technically competent users who are running Linux on hardware that isn't cutting edge (yep, it's still a problem for Linux) and who are willing to accept the associated 5% performance penalty. No free solutions to force MS to clean up their act means they just won't, no matter how many collective years of human life is wasted clicking through 5000 different boxes now.
  - binarybanana 5y ago
    >and home users only got the ability to pass through a subset of consumer-level nVidia GPUs (which IIRC doesn't apply to laptops, so you're still stuck there) That's not quite correct any longer. Nvidia now supports passthrough on all consumer GPUs that work with their current driver. This also includes laptops with Nvidia chips and they've been actively fixing bugs and compatibility problems in every driver release since then. Before official support the Nvidia kernel driver just crashed Windows with a BSOD on my laptop. Then it suddenly worked, but I wasn't able to open the control panel and worse, the HDMI output didn't work. The driver after that fixed those problems. The only things still not working are voltage and power monitoring, although temps work. Additionally, and I know this is a special case, performance is actually better than on bare metal. The reason is that in a VM I can inject a modded VBIOS with higher power limits and that gives me a nice 15-20% boost. I can't do that on bare metal because the VBIOS is stored in the system firmware and accessed via an ACPI method by the driver. Sadly only signed firmware can be flashed directly and even a flash programmer wouldn't help because at boot the firmware is verified and overwritten by a clean if it doesn't pass. This doesn't matter for desktop chips, but on a laptop you can actually get way more FPS if the power limits are ridiculously low by default! In my case I went from 30W or so to 75W (PCIe limit) and even though clocks stayed the same, games ran much faster. I guess it was hitting power limits and throttled, but didn't down lock because clocks only depend on voltage and available voltage level on temperature. I also ever saw power limits (via AfterBurner OSD) in furmark, but apparently it was also limited in other workloads without indicating it. With the modded VBIOS I don't even see power limits in furmark. It's either voltage or temps.
    - qball 5y ago
      Perhaps, but the standard VFIO-style passthrough methods (if you can call anything about that "standard") is still a terrible solution; it requires more than one GPU to use both systems at once, requires navigating horrifically underdocumented driver systems that brick the system when experimented with (just like everything in Linux does, for that matter), and requires at the very least switching inputs between the host and the guest even if all of that works perfectly somehow. Sure, there might not be any more Code 43 (which wasn't the hardest thing to bypass, but you did have to hide the fact that the VM was a VM), but Code 43 was the relative tip of the iceberg compared to all the other setup you had to do to even get there in the first place. Passing through an nVidia GPU the way that data centers do it, where you can run several hardware-accelerated VMs on the same GPU (as well as the host, on only one set of outputs), to my knowledge still requires this hack (https://github.com/DualCoder/vgpu_unlock); https://github.com/DualCoder/vgpu_unlock); this is specifically what I'm referring to and is really the only workable solution as it's the closest to "press button get seamless performance from your gaming Windows VM" as we can get right now. I'd be delighted to now be wrong about my assessment of how difficult trying to set that nonsense up was, because then I could do it and stop worrying about how awful the Windows 11 experience is going to be (even GNOME, for all its user-hostility, still isn't stupid enough to ditch the taskbar labels for the full OS X dock; Windows 11 has so far made that shit mandatory).
yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
On the one hand, yes. On the other hand, people bash Linux distros for inconsistent UIs so I get a kick out of pointing out that the shoe is on the other foot.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
Tijdreiziger 5y ago
I concur. Until reading this article I didn't know Fluent Design, Metro and Windows 8 Win32 were supposed to be separate design languages; I'm still not convinced, and in any case I can only see those with the sharpest of eyes noticing any differences here. Calling out things like MMC, winver and screensaver settings as relics from Windows 95 also seems like a huge stretch to me. Even though their layout has remained the same (which is a good thing; they do their job well), their design language is quite clearly different from their Windows 95 counterparts.
johnwalkr 5y ago
The worst offender is network settings. After years of at least weekly needing to change some setting for a virtual adapter, VPN etc, I find myself stumbling trying to get to the right screen.
- stinos 5y ago
  You just have to know it is called 'network connections'. So like most other GUI things: hit Start button, start typing 'network connections'. For me it pops up after typing 'net' already. Which is actually easier and more consistent than in any other Windows version (IIRC), and super accessible, and faster than hunting for things with the mouse. Now if they'd add fuzzy matching this would be wild :) Alternative would be knowing that a lot of 'old' control panel UIs are accessible through the new one, so: go into the new settings UI to network-related stuff (Win-x, w or Win-X, n and start typing 'network') and there will be 'change adapter settings' somewhere. Or possibly you can change the setting you want from the new UI. Which indeed shows this particular par was turned into a mess. But as the OP says: I haven't actually been bothered by it a lot myself. Likewise for some UI parts looking different: it has been like that since as long as I can remember on computers, no matter which OS or whether it's a CLI, TUI or GUI: if you use more than a couple of tools there are always going to be tools which look and/or do things in a different way. So people kinda get used to that anyway. Not that it's an excuse for doing this to an OS, but just looking at it from the practical side.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- mmis1000 5y ago
  yep... It now have about 3 or 4 dawn places for you to configure. The wifi and hotspots are in metro ui setting app. Interfaces are in its own standalone app. (win7 style) However... The firewall are in a xp style standalone app. Can't they combine them into one app or at least make a folder that contains link to them?
- 0-_-0 5y ago
  Maybe the Windows God Mode "cheat" would help. It has all Windows settings in one place. You can create a direct shortcut to any of them from there. Activate it be creating a new folder and naming it "GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}".
code_duck 5y ago
It’s very nice that you can install and all the driver, but what does that have to do with the control panel being a chaotic mess of layers from the past 25 years? I find this article rather informative as someone who hasn’t used windows in 10 years. Now that it’s all laid out there, I can clearly see that various layers of the control panel are using the visual style of Vista, 2000, and so forth. I suppose Microsoft has technical reasons for not making the some of the most important user-facing parts of their flagship product consistent in terms of interface, but it’s quite a stretch to say that the consistency shown here is anything other than abysmal. No wonder my parents find this incredibly confusing.
numpad0 5y ago
Isn’t it interesting that the inconsistency arguments mostly surfaces around software configuration, like “_Settings_ app is stupid” “I still use XP style _driver installation_ screen” etc? It makes sense why it’s not much of an issue on other GUI environments: in GNU/Linux and macOS, only what’s available on GUI is available on GUI, and the rest goes to the unified scary black screen with very task specific procedures. Only in Windows the GUI is primary means of configuration and only Windows carry over old GUI associated with each configuration items.
- Closi 5y ago
  It's a good point - I wonder if the actual user really sees an old-looking GUI screen as worse than an arcane terminal configuration.
  - TheSmiddy 5y ago
    an arcane terminal configuration at least opens up the possibility of 3rd party settings GUI's to "unlock the hidden potential of your operating system" for the user who wants to tinker but with the safety rails still attached.
    - oblio 5y ago
      Most of the Windows stuff can be automated via WMI.
igornadj 5y ago
The article shows clearly there are multiple design languages in very common tasks. The first point is that the volume picker is different from the latest design. This is something users interact with on a daily basis.
audunw 5y ago
> In day-to-day usage, I have rarely been annoyed by these "inconsistencies". Don't you ever have to change sound settings? Because I have to deal with that every week, and have to dig through 3 different style of UIs and several different windows/dialogs to get to what I need. Everything related to control panel / settings is a giant mess, and it's often really hard to find the settings you want, especially if you don't already know where it is. Some things is in the new UI, some in an old UI. It's actually one of the main reasons why I really don't want to use Windows for my home laptop. Windows does have it strengths, and I don't mind using it at work, but I really don't want any of that bullsh*t when I get home from work.
- dalmo3 5y ago
  Right click on the volume icon > Sounds - goes straight to the old XPish UI, which offers most if not all settings.
  - SanJacobs 5y ago
    Because this exists, I've never understood why they made another one, but missing half the options
- MikusR 5y ago
  Can you explain what sound settings are you changing?
chaos_a 5y ago
Try right clicking anywhere. Almost everything has it's own fancy right click menu design for no good reason. Personally I don't find it annoying, but it's just silly that such a large company can't just stick to one design.
- formerly_proven 5y ago
  It's kinda hilarious/sad that MS Office essentially developed their own UI framework which, as I understand it, was unavailable even for other teams in Microsoft, so stuff like ribbons and "advanced" pop up menus got reinvented even inside Microsoft, not to mention countless times outside Microsoft. So much of this is self-inflicted on the part of Microsoft.
  - Macha 5y ago
    Not unique to Microsoft here, there was an android police article where they identified like 10 inconsistent action bar implementations from Google apps then a follow up a year later doing the same for navigation drawers when they were the android UX elements Google were pushing most
EvanAnderson 5y ago
I don't understand why the UI is such a big deal to people here. I can deal with UI. I'll (grudgingly) accept changes to UI that break my hard-learned muscle memory and figure out the "new way" to do things. I just want a version of Windows that I am in control of. I don't want my machines (or my Customers' machines, for whom I am responsible to support) torpedoing themselves with shoddy updates that try to install at inappropriate times (need to shut down your laptop to put it into a bag and head home-- tough-- we're installing updates!). I can deal with UI. I've been learning new UI my whole life. The whole "it's not your computer anymore" tack Microsoft took with Windows 10 is condescending and abusive.
unethical_ban 5y ago
My beef is mostly with the lack of consistency with the control panel and settings. They have "Win10"ed most of it by now, though, but for several years you had this weird, often overlapping set of UIs from Win7 and Win10. Minor things like Win10 vs. Metro are less obvious, though.
alok-g 5y ago
I personally also don't have a problem. Think however about people who are new to computers, whether adults or kids growing. They find it all confusing.

jolux 5y ago

As a primary macOS user who has also done professional Windows development, I am simultaneously blown away by the quality of the development environments and tools (PowerShell! C#! .NET! Visual Studio!) available on Windows and more or less disgusted with the inconsistency in using the operating system itself. It doesn’t feel like Microsoft has had a consistent vision for how their UI is supposed to work for longer than five years at a time, if that. Sure, it’s only an annoyance, but why the hell is it a problem in the first place? I can only conclude either that they do not see it as a problem, or that they are incapable of fixing it. I was a Windows user until 2014. Every time I think about switching back (mostly because WSL is so good) I have to think about putting up with the terrible UI.

qball 5y ago
>I can only conclude either that they do not see it as a problem, or that they are incapable of fixing it. They really shot themselves in the foot 10 years ago when they decided to go all-in on making their desktop and server OSes a giant advertisement for their tablets. Which nobody bought, of course. Didn't help that it took them 4 years to get up to feature parity with what you could do on iOS and Android out of the box (like support for SQLite) or that the sandboxed nature of WinRT/UWP meant that you had to jump through a bunch of extra hoops if you so much dared to save a file to the local machine. They just haven't recovered from that, have had zero incentive to improve, and it shows (MS lost the mobile OS war just as hard as IBM lost the desktop OS war); workplaces are going to buy licenses no matter what, and home users only got the ability to pass through a subset of consumer-level nVidia GPUs (which IIRC doesn't apply to laptops, so you're still stuck there) to a Windows guest VM thanks to a recent driver hack, and that's only for technically competent users who are running Linux on hardware that isn't cutting edge (yep, it's still a problem for Linux) and who are willing to accept the associated 5% performance penalty. No free solutions to force MS to clean up their act means they just won't, no matter how many collective years of human life is wasted clicking through 5000 different boxes now.
- binarybanana 5y ago
  >and home users only got the ability to pass through a subset of consumer-level nVidia GPUs (which IIRC doesn't apply to laptops, so you're still stuck there) That's not quite correct any longer. Nvidia now supports passthrough on all consumer GPUs that work with their current driver. This also includes laptops with Nvidia chips and they've been actively fixing bugs and compatibility problems in every driver release since then. Before official support the Nvidia kernel driver just crashed Windows with a BSOD on my laptop. Then it suddenly worked, but I wasn't able to open the control panel and worse, the HDMI output didn't work. The driver after that fixed those problems. The only things still not working are voltage and power monitoring, although temps work. Additionally, and I know this is a special case, performance is actually better than on bare metal. The reason is that in a VM I can inject a modded VBIOS with higher power limits and that gives me a nice 15-20% boost. I can't do that on bare metal because the VBIOS is stored in the system firmware and accessed via an ACPI method by the driver. Sadly only signed firmware can be flashed directly and even a flash programmer wouldn't help because at boot the firmware is verified and overwritten by a clean if it doesn't pass. This doesn't matter for desktop chips, but on a laptop you can actually get way more FPS if the power limits are ridiculously low by default! In my case I went from 30W or so to 75W (PCIe limit) and even though clocks stayed the same, games ran much faster. I guess it was hitting power limits and throttled, but didn't down lock because clocks only depend on voltage and available voltage level on temperature. I also ever saw power limits (via AfterBurner OSD) in furmark, but apparently it was also limited in other workloads without indicating it. With the modded VBIOS I don't even see power limits in furmark. It's either voltage or temps.
  - qball 5y ago
    Perhaps, but the standard VFIO-style passthrough methods (if you can call anything about that "standard") is still a terrible solution; it requires more than one GPU to use both systems at once, requires navigating horrifically underdocumented driver systems that brick the system when experimented with (just like everything in Linux does, for that matter), and requires at the very least switching inputs between the host and the guest even if all of that works perfectly somehow. Sure, there might not be any more Code 43 (which wasn't the hardest thing to bypass, but you did have to hide the fact that the VM was a VM), but Code 43 was the relative tip of the iceberg compared to all the other setup you had to do to even get there in the first place. Passing through an nVidia GPU the way that data centers do it, where you can run several hardware-accelerated VMs on the same GPU (as well as the host, on only one set of outputs), to my knowledge still requires this hack (https://github.com/DualCoder/vgpu_unlock); https://github.com/DualCoder/vgpu_unlock); this is specifically what I'm referring to and is really the only workable solution as it's the closest to "press button get seamless performance from your gaming Windows VM" as we can get right now. I'd be delighted to now be wrong about my assessment of how difficult trying to set that nonsense up was, because then I could do it and stop worrying about how awful the Windows 11 experience is going to be (even GNOME, for all its user-hostility, still isn't stupid enough to ditch the taskbar labels for the full OS X dock; Windows 11 has so far made that shit mandatory).

yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago

On the one hand, yes. On the other hand, people bash Linux distros for inconsistent UIs so I get a kick out of pointing out that the shoe is on the other foot.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

Tijdreiziger 5y ago

I concur. Until reading this article I didn't know Fluent Design, Metro and Windows 8 Win32 were supposed to be separate design languages; I'm still not convinced, and in any case I can only see those with the sharpest of eyes noticing any differences here. Calling out things like MMC, winver and screensaver settings as relics from Windows 95 also seems like a huge stretch to me. Even though their layout has remained the same (which is a good thing; they do their job well), their design language is quite clearly different from their Windows 95 counterparts.

johnwalkr 5y ago

The worst offender is network settings. After years of at least weekly needing to change some setting for a virtual adapter, VPN etc, I find myself stumbling trying to get to the right screen.

stinos 5y ago
You just have to know it is called 'network connections'. So like most other GUI things: hit Start button, start typing 'network connections'. For me it pops up after typing 'net' already. Which is actually easier and more consistent than in any other Windows version (IIRC), and super accessible, and faster than hunting for things with the mouse. Now if they'd add fuzzy matching this would be wild :) Alternative would be knowing that a lot of 'old' control panel UIs are accessible through the new one, so: go into the new settings UI to network-related stuff (Win-x, w or Win-X, n and start typing 'network') and there will be 'change adapter settings' somewhere. Or possibly you can change the setting you want from the new UI. Which indeed shows this particular par was turned into a mess. But as the OP says: I haven't actually been bothered by it a lot myself. Likewise for some UI parts looking different: it has been like that since as long as I can remember on computers, no matter which OS or whether it's a CLI, TUI or GUI: if you use more than a couple of tools there are always going to be tools which look and/or do things in a different way. So people kinda get used to that anyway. Not that it's an excuse for doing this to an OS, but just looking at it from the practical side.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
mmis1000 5y ago
yep... It now have about 3 or 4 dawn places for you to configure. The wifi and hotspots are in metro ui setting app. Interfaces are in its own standalone app. (win7 style) However... The firewall are in a xp style standalone app. Can't they combine them into one app or at least make a folder that contains link to them?
0-_-0 5y ago
Maybe the Windows God Mode "cheat" would help. It has all Windows settings in one place. You can create a direct shortcut to any of them from there. Activate it be creating a new folder and naming it "GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}".

code_duck 5y ago

It’s very nice that you can install and all the driver, but what does that have to do with the control panel being a chaotic mess of layers from the past 25 years? I find this article rather informative as someone who hasn’t used windows in 10 years. Now that it’s all laid out there, I can clearly see that various layers of the control panel are using the visual style of Vista, 2000, and so forth. I suppose Microsoft has technical reasons for not making the some of the most important user-facing parts of their flagship product consistent in terms of interface, but it’s quite a stretch to say that the consistency shown here is anything other than abysmal. No wonder my parents find this incredibly confusing.

numpad0 5y ago

Isn’t it interesting that the inconsistency arguments mostly surfaces around software configuration, like “_Settings_ app is stupid” “I still use XP style _driver installation_ screen” etc? It makes sense why it’s not much of an issue on other GUI environments: in GNU/Linux and macOS, only what’s available on GUI is available on GUI, and the rest goes to the unified scary black screen with very task specific procedures. Only in Windows the GUI is primary means of configuration and only Windows carry over old GUI associated with each configuration items.

Closi 5y ago
It's a good point - I wonder if the actual user really sees an old-looking GUI screen as worse than an arcane terminal configuration.
- TheSmiddy 5y ago
  an arcane terminal configuration at least opens up the possibility of 3rd party settings GUI's to "unlock the hidden potential of your operating system" for the user who wants to tinker but with the safety rails still attached.
  - oblio 5y ago
    Most of the Windows stuff can be automated via WMI.

igornadj 5y ago

The article shows clearly there are multiple design languages in very common tasks. The first point is that the volume picker is different from the latest design. This is something users interact with on a daily basis.

audunw 5y ago

> In day-to-day usage, I have rarely been annoyed by these "inconsistencies". Don't you ever have to change sound settings? Because I have to deal with that every week, and have to dig through 3 different style of UIs and several different windows/dialogs to get to what I need. Everything related to control panel / settings is a giant mess, and it's often really hard to find the settings you want, especially if you don't already know where it is. Some things is in the new UI, some in an old UI. It's actually one of the main reasons why I really don't want to use Windows for my home laptop. Windows does have it strengths, and I don't mind using it at work, but I really don't want any of that bullsh*t when I get home from work.

dalmo3 5y ago
Right click on the volume icon > Sounds - goes straight to the old XPish UI, which offers most if not all settings.
- SanJacobs 5y ago
  Because this exists, I've never understood why they made another one, but missing half the options
MikusR 5y ago
Can you explain what sound settings are you changing?

chaos_a 5y ago

Try right clicking anywhere. Almost everything has it's own fancy right click menu design for no good reason. Personally I don't find it annoying, but it's just silly that such a large company can't just stick to one design.

formerly_proven 5y ago
It's kinda hilarious/sad that MS Office essentially developed their own UI framework which, as I understand it, was unavailable even for other teams in Microsoft, so stuff like ribbons and "advanced" pop up menus got reinvented even inside Microsoft, not to mention countless times outside Microsoft. So much of this is self-inflicted on the part of Microsoft.
- Macha 5y ago
  Not unique to Microsoft here, there was an android police article where they identified like 10 inconsistent action bar implementations from Google apps then a follow up a year later doing the same for navigation drawers when they were the android UX elements Google were pushing most

EvanAnderson 5y ago

I don't understand why the UI is such a big deal to people here. I can deal with UI. I'll (grudgingly) accept changes to UI that break my hard-learned muscle memory and figure out the "new way" to do things. I just want a version of Windows that I am in control of. I don't want my machines (or my Customers' machines, for whom I am responsible to support) torpedoing themselves with shoddy updates that try to install at inappropriate times (need to shut down your laptop to put it into a bag and head home-- tough-- we're installing updates!). I can deal with UI. I've been learning new UI my whole life. The whole "it's not your computer anymore" tack Microsoft took with Windows 10 is condescending and abusive.

unethical_ban 5y ago

My beef is mostly with the lack of consistency with the control panel and settings. They have "Win10"ed most of it by now, though, but for several years you had this weird, often overlapping set of UIs from Win7 and Win10. Minor things like Win10 vs. Metro are less obvious, though.

alok-g 5y ago

I personally also don't have a problem. Think however about people who are new to computers, whether adults or kids growing. They find it all confusing.