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Comment by nemacol | Hacker News Reader

The real kick in the beans from MS is the new UI lacks anything beyond basic functionality in the new UI. For example, Win10 (1803) Mouse settings you can modify: Left/Right handed, Scroll Wheel lines, Scroll inactive windows when you hover.

For every other change you have to click "Additional mouse options" and are taken to the old UI.

MS Win10, and to a lesser extent Server 2016-19 has increased the number of clicks it takes me to get to the thing dramatically.

In 7 I relied heavily on the search feature - it was wonderful to type "Programs and" hit enter and get to the page I want. Today they have hidden (in win10) those old UI screens.

It is frustrating.

I would accept the new UI if it had feature parity, but it can't even perform the most basic tasks (mouse pointer speed for example).

Edit - Spelling.

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The old mouse UI is due to third party software that adds their own interface on top of it. Microsoft do want to move away from it but they don't want to break backwards compatibility.

Totally agree. Their UI seems to be made only with ease of use of the most common case in mind, not spearing a single thought for power users. My preferred example is getting WLAN details before connecting. No way to do this with Win10s UI.

I totally understand mobile phones having having barely any space available. Even desktop optimizing for common use cases. But there got to be a limit on how much you dumb down your software.

Use the cortana bar to search for control panel settings in Windows 10.

The UX for system settings is still like barf, arbitrarily choosing between two UIs depending on the setting is some shit that wouldn't even fly in desktop Linux in 2019, and was an artifact of the Win8pocalypse which Microsoft later walked back. But searching for settings is still possible.

I think that the settings search has gotten worse in 10. "Disk management" no longer returns the relevant MMC, for example, I have to search "disk partitions". Last night, "add or remove" defaulted to a web search, so I searched "programs" and "Add or Remove Programs" was the first result...I still can't figure out that one.

I can search for control panel options just fine in Windows 10. Not on my machine right now, but searching for "mouse" brings up both the new settings page and the control panel one just below.

Feature parity

It already has feature parody. Like how the UWP version of the remote desktop client doesn't allow you to paste files from your PC to the remote host, while the old version does. Hilarious.

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