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> often with no UX/UI design at all or copying from Windows/OSX at best. This might be correct but also misleading. Since Ubuntu 6.06 the time to productivity

> often with no UX/UI design at all or copying from Windows/OSX at best. This might be correct but also misleading. Since Ubuntu 6.06 the time to productivity and intermittance factor of Linux compared to Windows has been heavily in favour of Linux for many of us. Also UX has become one of the strong points of Gnome 2, later Mate and KDE 5/Plasma: reliable, no nonsense, just works, no designers using you as lab rats for their next great idea. I remember installing Windows back then and it was 4 hours solid work from starting what should be configuration of a "pre-installed" OS through one or two hours of waiting for actual installation to finally removing the last McAfee scareware. Windows keeps getting better in some ways but still struggles with confusing control panels (yep, plural) and a mix of old, reliable menus, that Office "menu" thing and the newer "cleaner" approaches without menus. Yes, this is one sided, but this is my view. PS: I use Windows at the moment and I have used it on and off since 1995 so I know it all too well.

mschuster91 5y ago
I don't get why you're downvoted, you got a very valid point. Personally, my daily drivers for the last six years have been various generations of Apple devices due to their supreme hardware build quality on the one side and Windows' nastinesses from "BIOS manufacturers and hackers can hide malware in ACPI tables" to "Windows 10 has no way to disable telemetry and has ads in the OS". > Windows keeps getting better in some ways but still struggles with confusing control panels (yep, plural) and a mix of old, reliable menus, that Office "menu" thing and the newer "cleaner" approaches without menus. Worst thing about the control panels is... it's been over 9 years since MS introduced the "new" Settings app. And yet, in 2021, it is still a mess with stuff hidden in old-style panels, somewhere in the new-style app, and other stuff deep within Group Policies. Why isn't everything available in Group Policies (which could also use a re-organization -.-) by default, with a well thought-out UI in the new Settings app by now?
- cptskippy 5y ago
  > Why isn't everything available in Group Policies (which could also use a re-organization -.-) by default, with a well thought-out UI in the new Settings app by now? It's a valid question but also not easily answered. The Control Panel still exists for a myriad of reasons. The Control Panel goes all the way back to Windows 3.x and contains interfaces to adjust things that while still supported are no longer relevant. The Control Panel also allows vendors to inject their own interfaces for managing settings, famously Synaptics Mouse Drivers and Flash. Getting rid of the Control Panel is easier said than done. Unless or Until they cut support for legacy systems, the Control Panel will probably persist even if the UI is hidden from the user behind Feature Activation or something else.

mschuster91 5y ago

I don't get why you're downvoted, you got a very valid point. Personally, my daily drivers for the last six years have been various generations of Apple devices due to their supreme hardware build quality on the one side and Windows' nastinesses from "BIOS manufacturers and hackers can hide malware in ACPI tables" to "Windows 10 has no way to disable telemetry and has ads in the OS". > Windows keeps getting better in some ways but still struggles with confusing control panels (yep, plural) and a mix of old, reliable menus, that Office "menu" thing and the newer "cleaner" approaches without menus. Worst thing about the control panels is... it's been over 9 years since MS introduced the "new" Settings app. And yet, in 2021, it is still a mess with stuff hidden in old-style panels, somewhere in the new-style app, and other stuff deep within Group Policies. Why isn't everything available in Group Policies (which could also use a re-organization -.-) by default, with a well thought-out UI in the new Settings app by now?

cptskippy 5y ago
> Why isn't everything available in Group Policies (which could also use a re-organization -.-) by default, with a well thought-out UI in the new Settings app by now? It's a valid question but also not easily answered. The Control Panel still exists for a myriad of reasons. The Control Panel goes all the way back to Windows 3.x and contains interfaces to adjust things that while still supported are no longer relevant. The Control Panel also allows vendors to inject their own interfaces for managing settings, famously Synaptics Mouse Drivers and Flash. Getting rid of the Control Panel is easier said than done. Unless or Until they cut support for legacy systems, the Control Panel will probably persist even if the UI is hidden from the user behind Feature Activation or something else.