6 ms·

But... don't the control panel windows have more functionality (and usability) in practice? I still go to "Sounds" even on Windows 10/11 because it's easier to

• 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
  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.
  • hulitu 2y ago
    > I am also amused how the modern window takes a good second plus to paint. The number of pixels is increased since the days of Windows 3.1. Even notepad needs a couple of seconds to draw its empty window on a new mashine. /s
  • Baeocystin 2y ago
    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!
    • bitcharmer 2y ago
      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
    • HideousKojima 2y ago
      Or heaven forbid you want to check your network settings and your printer settings at the same time!
      • altusbrown 2y ago
        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!
        • reachableceo 2y ago
          What information are you specifically seeking that you aren’t finding on that page?
        • smcin 2y ago
          Specifically Windows 11? Is that due to bugs, or intentional redesign?
          • sidewndr46 2y ago
            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.
            • reachableceo 2y ago
              What information are you specifically seeking that you aren’t finding on that page?
      • lolinder 2y ago
        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!
    • Incipient 2y ago
      This right here. Unfortunately it's just a symptom of Windows (and most things) not being designed for the power user/administrator.
      • kijin 2y ago
        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.
      • ozim 2y ago
        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.
      • deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      • mewpmewp2 2y ago
        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.
        • passwordoops 2y ago
          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
        • myth2018 2y ago
          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
    • 0x0 2y ago
      Maybe they should rename the operating system from "Microsoft Windows" to "Microsoft Window".
      • hulitu 2y ago
        They seem to copy Android heavily. Android is also a single tasking OS with a lot of TSRs. /s
      • IWeldMelons 2y ago
        Microsoft Win Dough
    • grishka 2y ago
      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.
      • dpkirchner 2y ago
        The ultra modern solution: just remove settings until they can all fit in a single window. And then remove a few more.
        • grishka 2y ago
          But keep the removed ones available to determined enough users through undocumented registry keys and "defaults write" commands.
  • chairmansteve 2y ago
    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.
  • xp84 2y ago
    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?
• ToucanLoucan 2y ago
  > 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.
• LegitShady 2y ago
  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.
• ActionHank 2y ago
  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.
• oakwhiz 2y ago
  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.
  • card_zero 2y ago
    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.
• zamadatix 2y ago
  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.
• squarefoot 2y ago
  > 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.
  • exe34 2y ago
    > save on development time thank you, I needed a good belly laugh! 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.
    • cyberax 2y ago
      IMO, the apex of Windows was WinXP.
      • flohofwoe 2y ago
        WinXP was just a reskinned Windows 2000... which was the actual apex of Windows UIs ;P
    • skydhash 2y ago
      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).
    • mkl 2y ago
• bitcharmer 2y ago
  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.
• static_motion 2y ago
  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.
• heraldgeezer 2y ago
  Checkout Eartrumpet. Aamzing program.
• Sakos 2y ago
  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?
  • ThrowawayB7 2y ago
    UI/UX is designed by UI/UX specialists at giant corporations. Often engineers who have criticism get brushed off.
    • mewpmewp2 2y ago
      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".
      • Sakos 2y ago
        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.
        • mewpmewp2 2y ago
• cm2187 2y ago
  And the settings network configuration is absolutely useless.
• HideousKojima 2y ago
  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
  • raggi 2y ago
    give it a few months and it'll start begging you to remove the printer too
• dartharva 2y ago
  It's Windows 11. Functionality and usability are not priorities here.
• Krssst 2y ago
  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?