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Comment by dustinmoris | Hacker News Reader

Ironically today I tried to pair a Bluetooth device on my wife's Surface Pro 4 and I told her to hit the Windows key and start typing Bluetooth and then select the result for managing bluetooth devices. She opened it up and we were unable to add the Bluetooth device no matter what we did. It was the most frustrating experience I had in months (I am a macOS and Linux user). Later I discovered that there is an entire different Bluetooth managing app on Windows. One had the old school look, the other had some modern oversized bullshit look. Turns out one of those two worked, the other didn't. Windows search returned the non working one first. In the taskbar was a Bluetooth icon to the other one. WTAF?

Honestly, fuck Windows for being such an utter pile of shit.

They don't need a UI re-design. They need a fucking working operating system.

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Later I discovered that there is an entire different Bluetooth managing app on Windows.

Oh, see, I thought this was going to end differently. Like how you typed in "Bluetooth settings" and Windows decided to bring up a web page with instructions on how to change the Bluetooth settings on Windows 10, instead of showing the g-ddamned applet.

Because that's how it seems to work on my machine most of the time.

Which is why I disable web search on the group policy panel.

This should be the default behavior.

Surely MS could look at their telemetry data they collect on absolutely everything and tell what people are disabling or otherwise modifying. The default of course will be "person does nothing" because most people have an adversarial relationship with their technology -- it must do what they want or they work around / cease to use it.

Then Bing would loose out on all that accidental traffic that still counts as traffic for selling ads.

Is the start menu listening to that setting again? I had to block it in the firewall.

WIN+"calc" opened up a Bing search for the term "calc" inside of Edge for me the other day. I imagine in a few more years that will actually be the expected behavior.

B-but Bing points! Support a charity or win Xbox with your aimless searches!

Try Win+R, "calc", OK. They haven't messed with the run dialog, so it still works like it did in Windows 95: quickly and reliably.

I was expecting that the application wouldn't appear at all, whatever they tried.

The number of common failure modes on the main interaction the Windows DE supports (that is opening the start menu and launching a program) is just incredible.

How to quickly open an app on Windows 10:

1. Hit Windows key and type name of the app. 2. Hit backspace until the app tops the result list instead of web results.

Does this make any sense? Nope...

counterpoint - maybe MS telemetry shows that people don't actually like to use apps in Windows 10 and thus it makes more sense to show web searches!

What Microsoft should be doing with this "Windows is back" initiative is comprehensively rethinking everything below the launcher and window management level. The visual presentation could follow the very same "fluent" system or whatever it is Microsoft is calling its current design language, but all the stuff from Control Panel to mounting network shares would be harmonized with the same UI metaphors and mental models.

What Microsoft almost certainly will do is yet another pass at launchers and window widgets, leaving its three-decades-deep sediment of system functionality largely untouched.

Couldn't agree more. The pragmatist in me would rather MS understand that people don't want quarter inch drills, they want quarter inch holes, and yet another part of me wonders how they could freshen up the UI. But what I want more than anything else is consistency. Either is fine, but both aren't.

Welcome to the new non-complete blue Control panel for Windows.

There was a time where opening the control panel gave you a view of all subsystems. I hardly remember it anymore. A faint memory.

The Control Panel in "small icons" or "large icons" viewing mode defaults to organizing the contents into columns. That's OK, that's pretty easy to read through.

The contents are also in alphabetical order. That's good, too, it's something the user is likely to expect.

Within the columns, the contents are not organized alphabetically! Instead the alphabetical ordering completely ignores the very clear column structure. Who does this?!

If you’re interested, look up “God Mode” it’s a shortcut that can be created which gives you access to a complete control panel which covers everything.

Thats a hack done not by Microsoft but probably a frustrated user who needed all subststems under a god damn umbrella.

I hate Microsoft Windows with a passion but I have to stick to it because of work reasons

You name a folder with a specific GUID and then the control panels show up inside it. It's by Microsoft.

It seems that God isn't omnipotent. God mode still doesn't allow me to tell my machine that I want to open .jpeg files with the Adobe Photoshop installed on my machine (like I can with .jpg) and not Photoshop Elements available through the Microsoft store). There is no option to search my file system for an arbitrary .exe.

Later I discovered that there is an entire different Bluetooth managing app on Windows.

And another for sound settings etc. It's like every setting has this evil twin which is there only to deceive you.

Why? Whose idea was this? To what end? I would really like to know the answers to these questions.

Ah yes, the so-called Metro apps. I believe they were part of the half-assed attempt by Windows 8 to work well with tablets and such.

Yeah there's now "Settings" which has a subset of options and the older "Control Panel" which has some more. It's a mess.

This was somewhat forgivable when Windows 10 came out, you can't do everything at once. But they seem to have completely stopped working on it 5 years ago.

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