4 ms·
It's always funny to me, the more you go into the depth of windows settings, the older the UI that start to show up. Which makes sense, between the "if we chan
by nolok 11mo ago
It's always funny to me, the more you go into the depth of windows settings, the older the UI that start to show up.
Which makes sense, between the "if we change it we break it in some subtle way" and "we don't expose that in UI anymore so the new panel doesn't have it".
My understanding is that windows want to move to a "you can't configure much of anything, unless you use group policy and then you set everything through that" so they don't update the settings and don't include them in the new screens for 90% of the things, but then they have this huge moat of non active directory users who need to go into the settings and my god are they bad.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- mavhc 11mo agoIn Windows 11 you're only 3 clicks away from a Windows 3.1 dialog box: ODBC Data Source Administrator (64-bit) Configure > untick "Use Current Directory", Select Directory
- netsharc 11mo agoI wonder if the Add Fonts dialog survived to Windows 10: https://notebooks.com/2011/09/12/how-to-working-with-fonts-in-windows-7/ https://notebooks.com/2011/09/12/how-to-working-with-fonts-i... - during the time Microsoft had 2 designs for settings/control panels, making the OS look like a mess coded by drunks... Gotta love that the disk and directory picker survived 20-30 years.
- ale42 11mo agoWell, it's not that the latest Office is that much different in this sense... just open Word, add a tab stop, double-click on it and you get a dialog box that probably was almost identical in Word 6 on Windows 3.1. Not that it looks bad or anything, it's perfectly appropriate IMHO. I still dream of getting back menus in Office, now some functions are so hidden that if you don't use them often enough you always lose ages to find them once again.
- fredoralive 11mo agoClicking the "100%" next to the zoom slider gets another Word 6.0 refugee, complete with nice pixel art 4:3 CRT. In Windows 10, Wordpad and Paint can both bring up the classic Windows 3.x colour picker Window, complete with the inscrutable Custom Colours bit. Although Wordpad is gone in Windows 11 and I don't think the Windows 11 Paint has the classic picker. It still (IIRC) has a colour arrangement in its new picker that is based on the classic pickers default colour set. Which were chosen because they dither nicely to 16 colours with the Windows 3.x dither algorithm.
- ayaros 11mo agoOne thing I appreciate about Windows is (in my experience at least) you almost never have to go into the command line to change a weird setting. There's always a toggle in the GUI somewhere. I mean, I'll use the command line if I have to... I just like the fact that the supported options are enumerated visually; I don't have to worry I'll break something. Also, I can peruse through a place like the group policy editor to find settings I would have otherwise never considered changing.
- kevstev 11mo agoThe equivalent in the win world to obscure command line settings is the registry. There is a whole heap of documented and undocumented config in there. 99% of the time you don't really need to go in there, but its often the more automatable way and occasionally you will find some fun options.
- NooneAtAll3 11mo agoand unsuprisingly that's considered one of the worst parts of windows
- Two9A 11mo agoMm, I still recall the time my Windows 98 installation corrupted its registry somehow. The only fix was to reinstall, and the machine had no floppy or CD drive... getting Windows back on there was a task.
- kevstev 11mo agoNo floppy or CD? You were just asking for trouble then IMHO. It was common to have to reinstall windows every 6-9 months in the win9x days. That didn't even really work for ME, but by then win2000 came in to save the day. Software was primarily distributed on CD those days, being without a CD drive must have been a huge hardship.
- 11mo ago
- RedShift1 11mo agoWould be nice in theory, if MS didn't make Windows 10 and 11 outright disobey group policies.