Microsoft formally deprecates the Windows Control Panel
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
I have no idea why things turned out this way, and I remember how with every other major OS release Microsoft promises a brand new rewrite, and yet if you dig deep enough you probably can find some UI from Win3.1 era.
(They might be MFC. Windows 2000 is about the right time for Microsoft to be C++ happy enough to push developers to use it over just using the bare Win32 C APIs. MMC was a pretty big deal when it first came out.)
They tried doing stuff in .Net for Vista but had to revert all that; perhaps they've now come back to using it for real, but I know the new settings panel is done in C/C++.
I guess you could make a temp account, and once you're logged in you can create a new local account and remove the online MS account.
Also, do the bypass methods that tools Rufus and Ventoy use still work?
But interestingly while Apple keeps some of the complexity hidden deep in ridiculous new squirrel holes in the settings UI (things like ( i ) circles), Microsoft just accommodates those who would miss the greater detail by also shipping the previous version’s entire settings screens wholesale under an “advanced” or “more” button from the new UI.
I am much more confused on where to find things in 10/11 than I was in Windows XP. But maybe I’m a minority because all the normies back then needed geeks like me to set up their XP PCs so maybe this is easier for them?
I still go to "Sounds" even on Windows 10/11 because it's easier to read and seems to have more functionality.
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.
It's a much more elegant solution than multiple windows in Windows!
windows now: "we hope your prompt engineering is strong, that is our only interface"
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I would say your comment makes more sense for Windows 2000.
windows '98 - even on a semi decent machine - was fast
On a CPU system fast enough to render it within a frame, you could switch that animation off. I think it was mostly there to preserve UI compatibility with potatoes.
Maybe if you ran Windows 95 on a 386 with 4MB of RAM.
Work is macbook, but I hate macOS settings and everything as well. Can't easily configure mouse acceleration or disable it is crazy to me.
On personal I use WSL for dev, but maybe I should just dualboot Linux.
The mouse feels perfect on Windows/Linux, but it's off in my Macbook. Sometimes also loses bluetooth connectivity, where it kind of starts to skip and/or stops working completely. And I have to take the bluetooth usb, put it back in for it to work normally again.
Maybe I should try another mouse, if you have any recommendations for a similar, ergonomic wireless one. Definitely don't want the magic mouse.
Ergonomically I think the Logitech one is perfect for me.
But the mindset lives on.
Sorry, what the hell is this? Do engineers at Microsoft actually think this is sensible, usable and accessible?
If engineer keeps pushing back, it is bad performance review and "hard to work with".
A lot of it is trying to make it look visually and superficially impressive trying to apply the common hammers like whitespace, very little visible content at once as to not "overwhelm" the user and other rules to anything, and then trying to pretend whatever that is going to increase the sales by doing non-sensical user research, only listening to what proves their initial vision and then later trying to cherry-pick success metrics.
A/B test the new Settings panel:
If User spends more time in the Settings page -> We just increased engagement. They must really like the new Settings page and find that pleasurable to use. That's a win.
User spends less time in the Settings page -> We made it quicker to find and tweak the correct settings. That's amazing.
Either way, any change you make you can find wins. You could even keep going back and forth between two versions.
Also another common flaw I notice with some redesigns or things in general is that when the features, e.g. config settings were initially released, there was very thorough understanding and need for that feature and whoever put it there knew the technical implications and why it is needed, and they put it there in such a way that it's reasonably easy to use and makes sense with other things.
However when redesigning, you are going to be exposed to all those features and nuances at once. And you won't have a good understanding of everything at all and all the little details and implications. And you might want to start with some sort of feel, framework and design to handle all of that. But then you are going to approach those features from an aspect where you have to take the features and make them adapt to the design as opposed to considering what makes sense specifically for that feature. And you won't have good understanding of the features, so either you are reducing the scope a lot or also just implement features incorrectly or in a poor way, not working well together with some other features, etc.
You might be into something though.
Or at least leadership definitely and obviously wants it, but product and design under leadership wants to just convince leadership that it's going to do that. But frequently it isn't or it's very difficult to analyze that data and it's easy to cherry pick flawed metrics retroactively to try to convince leadership that it actually did some improvements. It's difficult to question and verify any sort of metrics without launching a whole investigation into it yourself, which rarely someone would have an incentive to do so.
It could be that at your workplace maybe these things actually do improve KPIs and sales, I would actually be more happy with that compared to if there are meaningless changes or changes that make things worse that don't improve sales at all.
What's really needed is internal pushback against UI changes without user studies to back them up as well as a willingness to listen to user complaints and not just brush them off as "people complain no matter what change is make hurdurdur". Perhaps also an understanding that even neutral changes (as far as usability is concerned) have a negative cost to users.
Now I'm imagining a kind of spreadsheet-based hell where the UI is one enormous vertically scrollable grid of cells that are sometimes labels and sometimes inputs and sometimes buttons...
I feel like I caught a glimpse of it once or twice in the VB5 / Java Swing days.
I dont even know where my failed prints from 6 months ago are stored until it bothers me with a popup that is slightly to fast to interact with.
I belive a complicated ui should have a kind of blog where you can find all the nonsense going doen in chronological order with tags and categories.
Bluetooth & devices > Printers & Scanners > pick any printer > Open print queue. The Print Queue can also then jump between printers.
And you don't need to go into the Settings app to change sound devices. Click the Sound icon in the taskbar, click the icon to the right of the slider with what looks like little sliders and an arrow, choose your device. But even then its pretty easy using the full Settings app. System > Sound > click the circle next to the device you want to change to the default. I don't get how that's materially worse than Control Panel > Sound > Right click > Set as Default Device.
The os should know when new screens are attached or removed and take logical action.
If you have 2 cars in your driveway you have to chose. If one is removed, which one do you use?
Putting things under system or behind a vague icon is not instantly obvious. If i did that i would sell nothing.
That 3 things combined in one icon is wrong is already obvious where you refer to it as the sound icon. The convention is for the banana icon to open the banana menu. You switch to the banana mind set and learn new banana features.
Meanwhile in the old devices and printers control panel it was just right click -> set as default printer
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?
In the Settings app there's only a "DHCP or no DHCP" option. No choice about DNS server info or DNS suffixes, no way to edit adapter settings (jumbo frames etc) and so on.
Another example, regional settings, the Settings app only allows for some bare-bones customization. Want to add additional clocks? Can't do that in Settings app.
So I truly hope this means they'll work on bringing that functionality over, rather than just removing the applets and let you sit there with the minimally functional Settings app.
But it's not necessary even in Linux. Many (most?) DEs offer control panels that let you do pretty much everything a normal power user will want to do.
Hasn't been true for a while. You can get to all of that from the Settings app these days.
So it's not integrated into the Settings app. And thus could potentially go away once they deprecate the rest of the control panel, if the main point of that is to do everything through Settings app. If not, why remove the control panel?
This can be entirely configured in the settings app. It doesn't launch the older properties. So for that, not kinda the answer is just it can.
Now, jumbo frames isn't able to be set like that yet, I'll acknowledge.
> And thus could potentially go away once they deprecate the rest of the control panel, if the main point of that is to do everything through Settings app. If not, why remove the control panel?
Microsoft hasn't even said they're removing the Control Panel yet. This is an Ars Technica article blowing up a single phrase from a Microsoft support article that says:
> Tip: while the Control Panel still exists for compatibility reasons and to provide access to some settings that have not yet migrated, you're encouraged to use the Settings app, whenever possible.
> https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/system-configura...
So all Microsoft is saying, get used to navigating to your network adapter settings in Windows instead of relying on going through Control Panel, because sometime it might not be there. Not necessarily tomorrow, not next quarter, probably not next year, but sometime you're going to have to figure out the Settings app.
Microsoft isn't saying they're going to pull the Control Panel without offering all the functionality through Settings. But expect for more and more of the Control Panel to disappear over time.
Also, the Control Panel disappearing doesn't mean every dialog and applet that used to be linked through there would necessarily disappear.
You're reading a lot into that small sentence if your takeaway is they'll be removing Jumbo Frame support.
How? I can change DNS server, but not suffix info.
> But expect for more and more of the Control Panel to disappear over time.
Right, but they're also not saying explicitly that they'll move all the settings that exist in the old Control Panel. And given their history, it's not a given that they'll do just that.
> You're reading a lot into that small sentence if your takeaway is they'll be removing Jumbo Frame support.
It wouldn't be the first time they removed access to some essential settings before back-pedaling. That said, sure, they'll probably add access to that stuff.
Of course, it's entirely possible someone else is at the helm of this area of Windows now, one that actually cares about power users. In which case my worries are probably unfounded.
1. A new UX head is hired and looks for something that will make them look important.
2. Initiate a usability research across all the features in the Windows UI.
3. Make an internal announcement. "Our research shows that many users are scared of changing settings in Control Panel. They are afraid of breaking the system by changing anything there. We will create a new UX for changing settings in a simple, intuitive, and innovative way."
4. They hire many UX researchers, visual designers, UI prototypers, and of course many middle managers.
5. A year later, another announcement. "We now have a complete understanding of how we can create a simple, intuitive, and innovative user experience. Now our engineering team will implement this in upcoming years."
6. They hire many product managers, UI engineers, program managers, QA team, and of course many middle managers.
7. Two years later, another announcement. "We are launching the new innovative UX that replaces Control Panel".
8. Get a lot of internal feedback. "The new UI doesn't let me change X or Y setting", "The new UI is too slow", "Too much whitespace in the new UI", etc. They are all ignored as "working as intended". They say "X and Y settings are used by very few users. Use the old UI for those settings."
9. Several years later, "We don't have enough engineering resources to maintain two different apps. Let's kill Control Panel."
;-(
There were a few of these staples that I could always rely on to fix issues for friends and family. I remember them from 20 years ago and they kept working reliably. Since I've long transitioned to using only Linux both at home and work, I have no idea how to get anything done in these fancy new lean and modern "streamlined" UIs and am not of much help to Windows users. At least so far Control Panel was there but even so, some things were added only to the dumb new UI parts. I think MS managers may be forgetting how much their users have been relying on their IT whiz kid relative or friend. If you cull power user features, you indirectly make life harder for the average user too.
Some multiplayer games with kernel rootkit/anticheat might not work, but I haven't encountered any Linux-specific issues in the games I play. I'm sure this isn't the experience for everyone but it's worth a try.
And the FAT filesystem driver: https://github.com/microsoft/Windows-driver-samples/tree/mai...
And also PowerShell: https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell
And most of .NET: https://github.com/dotnet
Maybe they could consider an Apple-style approach: open source the core of the kernel and text-mode user space but leave the GUI closed.
Of course, open sourcing everything would be even better, but that might too big of a step for them. Open sourcing the non-GUI core could be a good initial step, whether or not it ends up going further.
Calculator (the horrible UWP one, unfortunately): https://github.com/microsoft/calculator
As for that FAT driver, it was traditional to include in the SDK/DDK sources of some of the actual drivers in Windows, so that one is not a surprise.
I think that is what could happen in 10-20 year period. As long as they could drive enough revenue from Cloud.
At least M$ under Nadella so far has a much better strategic play than most other tech CEO.
If you're willing to ignore Imaginary Property laws, there are some very interesting chimeric OSes out there on the shadier parts of the Internet.
Did you have something else in mind? Email is in my profile in case you have a link that you can share.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/14/24220138/microsoft-bitloc...
Being open-source wouldn't fix things like that.
It'll be just like Gnome: PRs that fix UI gaffes wouldn't be accepted because "The Developers Know Better!"
You thought open-source means there'd be no design and they'd only jam code, while designing and architecturing is only for proprietary projects within ivy towered castles?
I use Office 2010 which seems moderately stable (2007 was a complete mess) + ubitmenu though I am occasionally irked that 2010 isn't fully compatible with nested comments some colleagues use...
Obviously the single toolbar only provides the most common and basic functionality but that's what i'd need in a toolbar - and if i'd need more i could probably customize it (probably, i don't know, never had the need :-P).
I came from the old school, and am still powering along through professional studies and office work as a relative power user.
Not one of the staff used the ribbon directly, they just searched for everything using Word's titlebar search field and picked the option from the results. Every time, unless it was something like embolden that has a keyboard shortcut.
I tried hunting and pecking through the ribbon but it was such a guessing-game, trying to imagine where the UX designer had filed the option, that I eventually relented and started using the search field too.
Reminds me of CAD programs which do have a more fully fledged command line but also incredibly dense ribbons/toolbars.
That's the problem. Toolbar buttons ought to be ONE-click shortcuts. Menus are multi-click.
My frustration stemmed primarily from having to constantly bounce back and forth between toolbar tabs to get certain tasks done (it's been a while so I can't remember the exact use cases, maybe formatting table borders and fonts/bold/etc). In those cases it legit doubled my clicks.
The ribbon essentially took my menus, and made them waste vast amounts of precious vertical screen real estate - not to mention less consistency in presentation & discoverability (particularly when other software I wasn't as familiar with began to copy the trend).
If I recall, older versions also did a better job of surfacing keyboard shortcuts (via tooltips), so you would inherently learn the ones you used most as you used the software.
On Word 2021, it’s Layout ribbon > click more Page Setup settings > use the dialog box.
It’s even one less if you just want basic settings like margin, size etc. and it live updates.
Part of me is just amazed at how slow large corps are - what does everyone do??
In so many areas the new stuff is not features complete or equivalent after years and years. And the usability is worse. And comically, despite going to a "modern" solution - the whole things runs SLOWER by far than classic settings which was near instant.
So both they why for the change and the seeming insanely slow pace of getting the old working (again) on the new and improved are both questions I think.
Sounds, printers, mouse, networking, user management and more - I feel like I'm always trying to fight my way back to harder to find classic control panels after trying to do stuff with the improved versions.
For larger installs you used to be able to loin to audit mode, customize a profile and make it the default for new users. That was super easy for even non-IT folks to do to get a baseline setup that seemed to cover almost all settings. Now that's gotten "improved" into garbage as well.
Instead we are getting UWP apps (mostly garbage) that can be hard to uninstall if provisioned in weird ways to a user.
This isn't exclusive to Microsoft, but it seems like all the research that went into Windows 95 isn't being repeated for new software. Windows 95, despite its flaws had actual UX research going into designing the project. It doesn't seem like that type of work is being done anymore, Apple also isn't exactly perfect here either, their new control/settings app is equally awful.
There's is an aversion to making software boring, but functional, but that's what most of us need. Microsoft could have frozen their UI in Windows 2000 era and it would have been fine for the majority of uses.
Win2k still very much feels like a nearly feature complete OS. It's got one of my favorite features: it shuts up and gets out of the way.
God, yes. It's exactly this. Windows 10 is always in my way, bothering me, nagging me. When it isn't being actively hostile, it's still in the way because so much just doesn't work.
And it just keeps getting worse over time, it's really astounding.
This bug has been present since after Windows 7, which was definitely my favorite Windows version. It was done.
Compared to that, search in the start menu (or Windows Explorer for that matter) is so comically bad it makes me weep. Before I knew about Everything, I could maybe believe there is something about NTFS or Windows security or whatever that makes it impossible to do fast quality search across the filesystem in modern Windows. But no, it's clearly possible, and it's such a shame that Microsoft is incapable of doing that in its own OS.
So, OK, sure, the alpha version couldn't do that, and the beta version couldn't do that, and by golly, launching apps quickly didn't make the release list... sure. But why hasn't this obvious optimization ever risen to the top of the feature list in the last several years?
The obvious answer is that nobody in Microsoft is empowered to care about the experience as a whole anymore, and it shows.
The slightly less obvious answer is that I bet Microsoft management has simply written off Windows now. It's not Cloud enough and too hard to make services- and subscription-based even if they put their best efforts in. I think they're going to discover that it was more foundational to their business than they realized.
I miss the days of performant OS. Even my lovely Fedora+KDE is getting more feature bloat than I can manage.
"With software, either the users control the program, or the program controls the users." -Richard Stallman
I would bet the average 20 year old can connect a new Bluetooth device on a phone OS faster than they can get to the Sound settings page of Win95.
I don’t think UX is static. The UI patterns we recognize change with what we’re exposed to. The Control Panel doesn’t look terribly far off from a terminal app ported to a GUI. It’s also pretty alien to someone accustomed to smartphones.
Older adults have used smartphones, but young adults have never used Win95, so a smartphone style interface is more usable for more people. I’m with you, I prefer the Control Panel, but Settings may be more utilitarian.
The moral of the story is that it is all about conditioning. MS should have left everything the way it was. The money they could have made! I could thoughtlessly click around and do everything on muscle memory.
Change things often enough and no one is comfortable. There are no improvements. A new user might like it, they might even like it more than the old user liked their iteration. Say, 5% better for 3% of the users 0.15% improvement in total vs 15% worse for 97% making it 14.55% worse. The difference is 100X
No we don't like the new Slashdot.
That is hilarious, that is one of my main complaint about modern flat UI is that it's almost never clear that you can click something. Everything looks like decorations or just text.
I don't understand how Win 95 icons are meaningfully different than the icons on a smartphone home screen. Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you meant.
Besides all this politeness getting in the way of honest opinion, scaling this to throwing away a multi million project 10 times in a row is hard. Might even seem illogical.
This depends on who your audience is, and I'm shocked by this community not seeing it.
The new settings are far more intuitive for non-experience users who are more comfortable with an iPad than a traditional computer. That's where the market is. The enthusiast demographic who actually understands what the settings mean and how the machine works is minuscule.
I understand your point from a purely aesthetic standpoint.
However the second that a commonly needed setting is required you're going a layer "deeper" (it's not because before it was at the first level) and that aesthetic is broken. I doubt the iPad first crowd is going to really intuit that.
Android and the like will just link you directly to the settings and most peoples computer now a days is a phone, not a laptop.
Right but the iPad UX is also terrible. All I can really do is remove and recreate. There’s no way to actually fix anything. This isn’t necessary. Advanced options could be exposed in iOS too. It’s just bad design everywhere.
I'm also amazed at software developers complaining about Microsoft's development process for the Settings app. They've been incrementally developing it for years -- which is a good thing -- and yet there so many complaints here that it didn't materialize fully formed on day one. It's like when talking about Microsoft everyone forgets how software development is actually done.
How is Microsoft still doing fundamental rewrites of core features?
Perhaps Stack Ranking and/or promotions being based on Visibly Changing Something.
And yet we're still having debates and active development on how to have graphical sessions on Linux.
iptables was released in 1998. That's 26 years ago. And yet those Linux devs are still working on nftables and firewalld.
If those Linux devs still haven't figured out how to do graphical sessions or firewall by now they never will.
FFS how to boot/init Linux is still under active development and some rapid changes over the past several years. If they can't even figure out how to boot how can you take those devs seriously?
Or maybe you redesign your stuff for the realities of today instead of just assuming what a few people did in the 80s was the be-all end-all of software and UI design.
Microsoft will not remove the control panel until you can do everything with the Settings app (or something else not yet invented). Despite this "deprecation" it's really not going anywhere.
My use of the settings app has slowly increased over time as more and more settings are available there. I have to be doing something pretty specific to open the control panel now.
Maybe it's more profitable to keep your users inexperienced. Easier to sell them cruft that way.
I don't think this demographic of tablet users who can't ever possibly accept another UI style actually exists. Poking at an unknown object to figure out how it works is not some ancient lost art. It's one of the most basic things that all humans do. We do this as infants.
Gods, imagine how frightened and confused DOS users were by Windows.
And I remember that the mouse was something that confused users.
And the joke about using the CD drawer to put the coffee there? I see it.
Yet, all those users (school managers and a lot of old ladies) get it anyway.
So not only does it interrupt and block me from opening the browser's File menu, but now I have a bunch of inaccurate "Favorite" tickets.
What they are presenting us is far more like the 90's Macromedia Flash style UI bloatware that hardware peripheral manufacturers also keep trying to foist onto us.
Having simple controls that don't accomplish tasks is not a valid example of simple controls to accomplish tasks, and I'm shocked at anyone here not seeing it.
If this theory of the users needs were true, then everyone would and should just use Chromebooks.
The reason Windows exists and must be used by so many even when they don't want to, why a Chromebook or an iPad doesn't cut it, is Windows is where all the actual unimaginably varied productivity and special purpose software is. Not because of the middle of the road generic office and web apps. It's because of those PLUS the infinite other. It takes both to be useful not just the big mass in the middle of the bell curve.
No matter how much bigger the numbers are for the common case, things need to cover all cases in order to be useful. Trying to reduce Windows down to a Chromebook or an iPad is silly when the Windows95 paradigm was already the simplification.
Windows without the functionality of Windows is nothing. An iPad is far better at that than a simplified Widows can ever be. Even if somehow MS managed to make an excellent iPad, then what? iPads already exist and someone else is famous for them. Meanwhile, the thing they ripped out was their very value proposition itself. The differentiator that gives them a reason to exist at all.
All that supposedly unwanted complicated stuff was litterally the primary value and differentiator of the product itself.
Also, ability to filter or sort a list wouldn't confuse iPad audience all that much, would it?
The fact you are trying to copy someone shouldn't prevent you from making it better in some basic ways.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060410-17/?p=32...
* No way to search or filter the list, or jump to the extension I want (PDF), let me first scroll past .3gp, etc
* List items are comically large, it must be like 10% of the information density from before
* The whole thing is just sloooooww
A regression in every sense of the word :(
Not to mention all the things that are straight up missing from the new control panel, like all the right-click options currently available in the Audio Devices dialog.
the appropriate idiom is "development effort" -- engineering as a discipline is not at all applicable here.
So developers who are otherwise incompetent can justify their employment and companies can virtue-signal their identity politics.
Look at when the steep decline in software quality began, and see what that happens to coincide with.
11 is, according to Microsoft in their official marketing material, "the most inclusively designed version of Windows". They sure are right about that -- they included a bunch of idiots in the design process.
Vista was a fine OS. The aero glass stuff was a little on the side of bad taste, but the UI usability wasn't bad, there was little difference in UI between Vista (the hated OS) and 7 aside from visuals, the layout of UI elements was mostly the same. And in terms of look, I can't say it was worse than the fisher price styling of Windows XP. Windows 2000 is where Microsoft aesthetics peaked and it's been downhill ever since.
The main reason Vista was hated was because it was very resource hungry compared to XP and most computers could barely handle it. 7's improvements on that side of things were rather minor, and most of the reason why people loved 7 is because they ran it with hardware that was modern enough so the experience didn't feel as slow as running Vista on 1gb of ram and an intel igpu (back then, intel igpu were unreasonably terrible. If you can do moderate gaming on low settings on modern igpus, back in the day, the intel igpu couldn't even run the UI of Vista, no AeroGlass/GPU compositing for you).
Most of the truly needed architectural change in Windows for the sake of reliability and security happened with Vista, though! Vista is when the graphic stack moved back to the user space and Windows became the OS that handled GPU driver crashes best. I remember when I had an ATi GPU with terrible drivers how good it felt to not reboot the computer or lose unsaved work as Windows could restart the driver on the fly and it wouldn't cause any issue except for 3d rendering software (so games would still crash in such a situation). Vista also virtualized some of the filesystem calls so that programs used to having full permissions to write in folders they had no business to write to could run in userspace without admin rights.
All the changes Vista did piled up in terms of overhead, making it a heavier OS, but it was all for good reasons. Some of the overhead could have been avoided if Windows had been designed the right way to begin with (like not letting people get used to running software with admin accounts) but Vista did what it could to make Windows a better OS. People who hated Vista just didn't understand how needed those improvements, which we take for granted today, were. I still remember those worms circulating on the internet instantly pwning computers just for /being on the internet/ during Windows XP's era. Installing XP from unpatched mediums like an old CD and then connecting to the internet to get updates was very risky without being behind a NAT or firewall.
I really feel grateful towards the work the Windows team did during the Vista era, that windows can be considered a decent OS at all is all coming from the legacy of the groundwork they did on its foundations.
https://www.globaldata.com/data-insights/technology--media-a...
48.3% whites are a minority and they are underrepresented compared to the 59.3% in the U.S. population.
That is just for background. GP tried to make the case that developers engaging in diversity initiatives, who are often white, do this for their career. In other words, they are unproductive B players, who will hire C players in order to keep their jobs. They also discourage A players from engaging in work.
Anyways.. watch any Microsoft "vision of the future" video from 1990 and it's basically just Teams. It took them 30 years to fully establish the steaming pile of bizarre Share Point plugins that is Teams.
Then, there’s the Windows search. If you ever tried using Settings and search. Most of the time you end up getting Edge opened with an outdated link or unhelpful Bing search.
I just hope they won’t axe it until figuring out how they make decent settings.
vscode's settings are easily my least favorite modern pattern, and I am flabbergasted that it's spreading to other tools. The "it's one big scrollable list with a sidebar nav" is great in some ways, but everything else about it is downright awful.
And I hate that quite a few extensions have a vague "just set X in settings" in their README's where X doesn't show up in the auto generated UI, and is called something else in JSON
I still don't know how to switch to the JSON-only view the few times that I need it.
And I hate that quite a few extensions have a vague "just set X in settings"
This is a special category of hellish perfection. Thank you for this cursed yet useful information.
Everything can be searched in VSCode, not just the settings page. Just do CTRL+SHIFT+P and type. Like this:
https://i.imgur.com/w2sTSPA.png
Like tredre3 said there's also a button on the top right corner of settings, but I tend to prefer to start directly into json mode through the command palette.
Being able to find any sort of action with the palette just by typing is hands down the best UI design I've experienced in software. It's not new, Unity had it in the older Ubuntu distributions, but it's unfortunately not seen often enough and Ubuntu lost it when they moved to Gnome.
The palette search box also has the smart design of placing to the top functions you use the most through the palette, so if you open the json settings a few times it'll pop up at the top before you even finish typing the word "settings". After a while, your interactions with the palette make its UI feel very personalized to your needs.
But I've never used a sophisticated application that does most of its config via registry editing. It's for extreme edge cases only, where it's basically fine - it's a worse about:config, but it serves the same purpose, you only go in there when you already know what you need to do.
vscode, in contrast, puts common things into hand-edited-json-only config. I don't think I've ever had a vscode project that didn't require json changes to work correctly. That's ridiculous.
So the level of crazy is not the same as if your roku expected you to edit json.
JSON(5, with comments) as a config storage format? And optional editing UI? Oh heck yes, that's perfectly reasonable.
Requiring manual JSON editing, even with fancy autocomplete? Hell no. Turn that into a UI with the same info you show in the autocomplete. Obviously. WTF VSCode. WTF every tool that has copied this. This is not even slightly acceptable.
IIRC, Eclipse had all of that (or maybe all that except for import/export?) five+ years prior to VS Code's first public release.
And given that "Do a substring search through this huge-ass mess of options and switches and winnow down to the matches" is such a blindingly obvious thing to add in when you get so very many options in your configuration GUI, I'd be shocked if there weren't several things that predate Eclipse that did that, too.
#1: Stop re-running a file search on sort.
Linux is less being used by our customers and for my job less useful / WSL or Mac VM is enough.
First commands I run on a new install/user.
:: Disable Web from Taskbar Search
reg add HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Search /v BingSearchEnabled /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f
reg add HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Search /v BingSearchEnabled /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f
reg add HKCU\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows /v DisableSearchBoxSuggestions /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /fLooks like it's time to audit the lists.
reg add "HKCU\Software\Classes\CLSID\{86ca1aa0-34aa-4e8b-a509-50c905bae2a2}\InprocServer32" /f /ve
To enable the classic right-click menu :)
You're definitely sharper than me. I spend 2 seconds every time I encountered it.
And the same is true for the settings app. I never really use the Control Panel–specific settings, and whitespace doesn't bother me, so I'm not inherently opposed to the new app. But the execution just feels subpar somehow—if I had to guess, it's probably the latency whenever you click anything.
(macOS also has all kinds of weird UI bugs too, e.g. the Bluetooth and sound dropdowns in the top menubar are very finicky for me. And System Preferences proper isn't much better. It drives me crazy....)
Windows 3.1 is better than earlier Windows, but I haven't seen a claim that it's better than Win95?
I don't really think 3.1 is eye-searing, but I think the basic design is pulled forward from 3.0 which ran on mostly any video card, but feels designed around 16 colors. Wikipedia says 3.1 requires vga, but they didn't make things pretty by default until 95.
Of course, all this is a matter of personal preference—I just think that nostalgia plays an underappreciated role in these discussions.
For functionality. I prefer modern control panel over 3.x - and over Settings.
1) Settings has no applets I can pin to the start menu (ex: printers).
2) I can't be in two parts of Settings at the same time.
3) Commonly-used control panel options: In Settings they can be missing, neutered or moved+moved again.
4) Settings still reverts to control panel applets for some functions. Will those options still exist without a control panel? No one knows.
fixes 90% of my gripes with Windows.
For example, say I want to set Irfanview to be my default application to view images. I need to go through every file type that Irfanview can open, then select Irfanview. I can't tell Windows just to use Irfanview for all the formats that it can handle.
In the W7 Control Panel, this was a single click.
She only cares about Excel a and email, but have been having a very hard time with 11. Once people finds out Linux User Experience with KDE does not change that much, people may start moving.
If she can't manage to find Excel and Outlook, I'm sorry but that's a skill issue. It's not that different.
It's practical to have them in a straight-forward list. Plus now I can have a short-cut directly to the power scheme, event though it still won't let me put it in the task bar. Windows is weird, which makes me believe this list is never going to go away. It would be too much trouble.
Sorry, it probably wasn't clear - not everything in the All Tasks view is necessarily exposed in other views of the Control Panel. That doesn't imply it's something completely independent of Control Panel though, it means you can't get to all views of Control Panel by clicking from the main view. I.e. it's not that this doesn't list more things than the main Control Panel view will, it's that it's part of Control Panel which would also be removed if Control Panel is ever "actually" removed fully instead of just having the main shortcuts to it removed. You're actually pretty close with:
> a hack for the search feature
As the Control Panel search will indeed filter via this view since it has everything.
But not having search(?), for example, makes the old one inferior no matter how familiar, dense, or “usable” the old one was.
If I type DNS in the settings search then I have to find the DNS settings, it’s that simple. If one version fails this test and one succeeds then the ranking is clear regardless of the rest of the UX.
But mostly I’m just going to come out and say it: I like redesigns and UX design is a feature in itself, while utilitarian design and familiarity is constantly overrated. Never moving anyone’s cheese is just catering to existing users at the expense of new ones.
Control panel have had a working search function, introduced in Vista. It worked in start menu, too, and was very much polished in Windows 7, before they've introduced any of the "modern" crap.
I may be misremembering though.
Is modern and streamlined what I want in a control panel replacement? When I think of modern and streamlined, I think about things that are so simple they aren't useful anymore, because they've replaced the complexity of control over a messy process with the intuitiveness of only having the illusion of control over a messy process.
That's where you run into truly ancient designs that haven't changed since the 90s. Event viewer, remote tools, driver install, etc.
And it's all still in there, using god knows what common .dlls from the dozen or so GUI toolkits that have come and gone. You have to admit, it shows an impressive longevity.
I just have to assume that Microsoft doesn't prioritize updating those elderly dialog boxes and tools because it's a thankless (and profit-less) task, which takes longer than expected and always filled with crazy edge cases and gotchas. They spent several years just updating the command line - granted, that's an important app which touched a lot of the OS, but it just shows the perils of messing with stuff that already works.
Does Microsoft publish a list of most used system apps based on their telemetry? It'd be interesting to see the bottom of that list.
So unless you have a locked down device like a phone, you can’t magically port everything over to a new settings app without providing a path for your ISV / IHV ecosystem to migrate to on timelines that are sensible for the business. And ‘drivers’ consists of way more than hardware devices: database access drivers etc etc.
Part of me wonders if an AI model couldn’t just sandbox the old UI and inspect it, and then auto map to a new settings style AI.
This popped today: https://pr0gramm.com/top/6301382
This is all modern examples but there are still bits hidden deeply within system that come from 9x times. I remember when MS published interface guidelines with Vista but the document was quickly forgotten and picture above shows all that mess. Personally, I remember almost all Ribbon UI changes and Windows Live brand "refreshes".
There were community attempts to polish interface initiated by Long Zheng, an user experience entrepreneur from Melbourne : Aero and Win7 Taskforce where you could submit all these inconsistencies and provide mockups (if you were able to do so). I'm pretty sure there were people from MS who took this unique feedback into consideration and some suggestions were implemented but with Windows 8 and 10 all these efforts become meaningless.
> The Control Panel is in the process of being deprecated in favor of the Settings app, which offers a more modern and streamlined experience.
Whereas the current text of the linked page on microsoft.com now says:
> Many of the settings in Control Panel are in the process of being migrated to the Settings app, which offers a more modern and streamlined experience.
Settings seems to be designed for touch screens that nobody uses. My laptop screen comfortably fits 70 lines of information. Settings gives me 17, less than a Commodore 64 which had 25 lines 40 years ago.
Though, my latest Android phone has been changing my behavior a bit. It seems every time I get a phone, the UI is way different from the last one. I don't bother trying to find anything in the UI anymore. Instead, the settings search has been working well enough in most cases.
My concern is that they're not going to invest into the proper, fully functional alternatives, maybe intentionally. And I suspect they probably want to use this deprecation as an excuse to take the control away from users, similar to other mobile OS. The new setting app lacks many important functionalities and usually redirects to old control panels. And MS can simply remove old control panels without giving us alternatives, or significantly restricted "modern" ones with less controls.
Microsoft would surely do better to build one UX for the normies and improve it rather than do a half baked job on two. The only mystery is why its taken so long. I can understand Microsoft wanting to phase the migration but its been 10+ years since Settings appeared.
If there's a request I would make to Microsoft it would be to expose all the settings, consistently, in a single programmatic way. Powershell would suit me just fine for instance. This idea that powerusers can just unleash on the registry, apart from being an incomplete way to control all the settings, is wild.
The control panel is the last thing that was familiar to me. I am sure Powershell works great, but coming from Linux that feels like a badly designed pain not even shipping with a useable terminal.
And don't get me wrong I hatet that control panel. But I was able to get things done without a lot of prior knowledge of the system.
That is the registry. It has an API and everything.
> apart from being an incomplete way to control all the settings
Well, if you want "all the settings," so you have to accept 'all the complexity' that comes with that. A decent example would be VLANs. They offer a very complex configuration surface if you consider all the deployment and standard options combined with the fact that not all cards and drivers implement them in whole or in part.
MS stumbles upon any good design once per decade and has many times as much of failed experiments. Prefering old stuff is not necessarily nostalgia if you can't make anything good for this long despite trying.
Every other windows is a wholesale failed experiment and forcing it to stay alive is a terrible idea.
I have no idea why they kept Win8 start menu alive in Win10 instead of using the last good one, the one from Win7. They even had it in dev builds of Win10 and it was great.
Agreed about the macOS dock. I occasionally use macOS as well and it kind of reminds me of a terminal bell in tmux, it just lights up for anything and everything. Windows at least has different colors, solid vs blinking, and even progress bars through the taskbar icon.
I use this to pipe audio from other devices (e.g. game consoles) to a device (Roger pen) that transmits audio to my partner's hearing aid, because Windows doesn't have real tools for handling audio.
Oh, what about when something goes wrong with a wireless driver and the only fix is disabling and enabling the device, once again in the old control panel? This happens sometimes when you sleep a Surface Pro 5.
They've been trying to migrate to the new settings for 10+ years and somehow the result is that we have features that are exclusive to the new one and features that are exclusive to the old one.
It's very common (at least for me) to see "small" 700 MB update ended up having 4+ GB downloaded.
/s
I wish Windows 7 was usable today, I'd switch back in a heartbeat. The peak of integrated and easy UI/UX on Windows was 7, and it went downwards after that.
I spent good 15 minutes clicking on every button in this new settings app, until at the very bottom of it, the "About" section of the settings gives a faint blue link to open "devices".
What is this "About" even about? Does anyone know the logic behind this section's naming and why they put the link to devices dialog exactly there? MS insiders? Would be very interesting to know ;)
But since you rarely use it it's tough to remember in the moment
80% of my tech support tickets for desktop help are from my Mac users which are only 8% of my endpoints. In my research, and experience, forcing Windows reduced calls and decreased costs because questions like "how do I send this file to..." and "how do I connect to this server" were eliminated.
Further, SMB doesn't work very well for Mac users. Try opening a network share with hundreds of thousands of images.
And last but surely not least, it's hard to secure company data on Macs because Active Directory integration is also broken. Sure, you use Apple's MDM solution, for added cost, complexity and training.
Anecdotally, I've seen Windows users quickly move to the top of the company while their seniors using Macs stay at the bottom because they constantly have difficulty being part of the team. Problems with sharing files, joining meetings, color schemes and profiles that don't match their counterparts', etc. All these little things add up and make for a difficult career path to advancement when you're constantly the odd one out having problems sharing and showing your work product.
Or, on Windows, I can deal with Google searches to find where a setting has moved to.
I'll take the Google searches.
As an analogy, a Rolex is a great watch. Is it objectively a functionally better time keeping device than a Tissot or most any other time keeping device? Not really. But I'll concede, it looks great and it makes a statement that a lower cost device doesn't make. There is value in that.
It's just that, for me, that justification doesn't weigh against practicality when considering the importance of a tool so critical to one's success and happiness in the modern world.
I was a big Apple fan in the 90s when Apple's Motorola chips really did have a big advantage in productivity for graphics and video production, and even just raw computational prowess. Especially when coupled with the superior UX of OS 7 compared with the competition of the time. But, the modern hardware and software landscape is very different.
I try to be objective enough to embrace the best utilitarian solution, regardless of brand or marketing. And, if I care about looks, Asus, for many years, was using the same manufacturer that Apple was. They were even sued over the similarities. Even today, several brands make Windows and Linux purposed hardware that meets or exceeds the optical appeal of Apple devices.
I think Windows today fulfills the need for both personal and enterprise computing, while Linux fills the need for privacy and professional tech development. And each one does so in that respective category separately better than Apple does in either one. And that's considering all the flaws and glaring shortcomings and long running issues of both Windows and Linux (referring to desktop usage only), sadly.
there's lots of things I don't like about windows but it's not this
Valve's done a LOT of good for moving the ball on Windows things just working (mostly) on Linux. Usually it's some form of DRM or video playback that doesn't work... for obvious reasons.
They finally did it. It works. I can just install Steam and play Hunt: Showdown and join a discord call. It's all I really wanted.
In fact every game I want to play works out of the box, and there's dozens across various genres. For an example list: Guild Wars 2, Stellaris, Crusader Kings 3, Counter-Strike 2, Dota 2, Baldurs Gate 3, Sea of Thieves, Halo Infinite are just some of the games I've been playing recently.
Hunt recently shipped a major update and it broke Proton support. Within a day Valve fixed it and it now works fine.
Sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that
The whole point of icons - to encapsulate meaning efficiently - seems to have disappeared from modern UI. Flat lists of text are fundamentally what we had in the early 90s before advanced CUIs and GUIs took over.
So clunky and slow in recent versions, it’s the only app that can make the latest M3 hardware feel underpowered and laggy. Yet still suffers from age-old problems like not being able to resize it’s window freely, which would at least help alleviate some of the UI weaknesses.
Older versions prior to recent redesign/“improvements” were actually better…
UIs will build themselves around a simplified registry.
How many people actually use Windows with a touch screen?
Feels like every part of the UI was designed by a different team in isolation, glued together and shipped.
Only switching to Linux could give you that peace of a actually working computer.
For comparison, configuring a network interface using Control Panel is simple, straight forward and allows me to change all the settings I want. Trying to do the same thing using the Settings app is complex, it hides pretty nuch all of the advanced settings that you want to see or change. And on top of that, it doesn’t even show you how long that interface has been connected to the network and how much data was transferred both ways: incredible debugging info lost.
Oh, and the fact that you can’t tick which updates you want and which you don’t…
I’m pretty sure others have other gripes with the “streamlined experience”.
The second gripe is they seem to add features to it whenever they change something in windows, so older stuff that doesn't change because it doesn't need to is not in it
This sucks more.
My general sentiment is that I am frustrated with tech companies imposing UIs on users. Some examples:
Duolingo changed its interface to this new "learning path" that took choices away from users.
Garmin updated its Connect app with a new UI that (I subjectively feel) shows less information and forces unnecessary compromises.
Microsoft has been messing with the Control Panel for years. The new UI is missing a lot of settings. I don't agree with the Ars article that you only need the legacy Control Panel for esoteric features: I never figured out how to set a Static IP Address in the new Settings app, which is hardly unusual for servers.
I trust it is possible to set a Static IP in the new UI, but I still feel like these changes are unnecessary and unwelcome.
Anyways, I do hope the PowerShell commands will remain stable for the next 20 years.
I presume it is documented on answers.microsoft.com. /s
I just don't get why you need to fuck with the networking on a device that is almost 100% getting DHCP. If you feel the need to mess with the network settings in Windows, you're kind of doing it wrong.
If you're going to have the l33t M$ sucks attitude, learn to set up your network properly and it's not an issue.
Of course it will take a while because Linux is still a complete mess on desktop, but the number of people willing to put their time into making it work slowly but steadily keeps increasing.
I would argue that, outside of clicking some folders and adding/deleting stuff, the skills required to make ANY desktop experience useful should be as low as possible. Example: I convinced a fellow gamer to give Ubuntu a try, and I helped him with the dual booting process. Then he realized that his framerates feel janky, due to issues with Wayland and vrr. His display had light surfaces flicker while gaming and, while we managed to make Final Fantasy 14 playable, we faced jarring mouse cursor movement when the framerates dipped, which didn't exist on Windows.
While reading this message I'm sure some people will feel an urge to say "oh that's just the monitor that's faulty", "that's just KDE and how it handles mouse movement", and they always miss the point: Just like a teacher doesn't care if a dog ate a homework, and the ISP customer if it was raining, the end user doesn't care if it's Wayland, KDE, Ubuntu or whatever. All they care about was "getting IT done", they couldn't, and now they have to accept a workaround solution or just go back to what they always used fine.
Part of the reason why is that, there's no focused effort towards a small amount of directions, and there's lots of opinion on who can do it better, even the definition of better. Since we're mostly developers, it's akin to working with .NET versus working with nodeJS. The fragmentation is inherent to the system, and the target audience loves it, even at the cost of the end user.
Is Wayland a viable windows system ? Why didn't he used X ?
Do people experience these issues on a Steam Deck or running Pop OS on System 76 hardware, etc?
The other thing I wonder about is (looking at the problems people are talking about here) whether Windows is any better. Windows can need a lot of fixing.
Inconsistency because of different desktop environments and control panels in different distros? Just pick one and stick to it.
Visual inconsistencies between Gnome and KDE apps?
Too much configurability?
https://se.mathworks.com/help/comm/usrpradio/ug/configure-et...
...maybe because you are used to it, but this process has confused me since I was 14. My eyes go blank and I just hammer out the inside-out learned clicks to get to that final screen. Compare this to the MacOS flow: Settings -> Network -> Port -> Details... It looks like the Windows 11 flow is similar to MacOS.
As always, Windows problem is that they keep interfaces unchanged until they're completely outdated. Then they completely replace them with new ones, nullifying the users experience with the old ones. They instead should gradually update components so that users have time to adapt.
> it doesn’t even show you how long that interface has been connected to the network and how much data was transferred both ways
it does show that
I do understand where you’re coming from. Which is the flip side of it, but what I don’t understand is why anyone really wants to use Windows in 2024. I’m not a huge fan of the direction Apple is going with their continuous platform lockin, but the smallest MacBook Air is cheap and works better than anything that runs windows. Similarly Chromebooks are actually just fine, ok maybe not outside the context of windows/macos/chromeos. I chose the Apple lock-in because my families likes iOS, but I would have been fine with Google.
If you like to tinker and own your OS there is still Linux.
Professionally I think Microsoft is doing fine. They have a functional monopoly on enterprise organisations, especially the 99% (citation = made up) which aren’t tech related. So it’s probably a decent enough strategy for them. Hell, I think the primary reason they don’t have a cheap device to compete with MacBook airs and Chromebooks is because they know windows would lose.
If that is outside of "absurd" to you then the Linux desktop world clearly needs to keep cooking a little longer. My non-IT friends would not have been able to figure this out and I don't think they should have to.
On a different laptop, it refused to output 4k@60 through the HP dock. After it started working, waking from sleep would be a coin toss whether I would get any image at all, or something garbled.
I’m “IT” and had no idea how to fix these. Even installing all the provided oem drivers made no difference.
A new development is Windows using the us English layout, although it’s not enabled. I have to add and remove it to fix it.
Everything worked perfectly on Linux since day 1.
My point is that you can't say Xos is great because it works well on this particular hardware.
Day 3, I grab an image of windows server 2022. It boots instantly to the install process and just works.
I know you can make Linux work, but the amount of suffering is still unbelievable compared to the alternatives in many cases. By the time I get the Linux thing figured out, I'll have forgotten about what it was I wanted to originally build.
I wouldn't mind a bit of tinkering, but this is sad. I happily pay Microsoft if this is the alternative.
It is true, if you are having a problem with Linux 9 time out of 10 it's possible it fix the problem, aka, you are the problem.
My limited experience with paying for an OS means if there's a problem your just out of luck.
I wonder if Linux advocates could take a small amount of ownership over the user/customer experience instead of projecting all flaws upon the user. It's an operating system. Most people aren't interested in making it their hobby or full time job.
This is so true. Whenever the power is out, my neighbors are all outside complaining, ”the power grid doesn’t work!!”
I try to tell them, if your power goes out and you can’t build your own wind turbine, maybe the power grid isn’t the problem.
Just in the last few months:
- My nvidia drivers stopped working because the drivers I had (which didn’t auto update) apparently weren’t kept up to date with the kernel (which had auto updates enabled).
- My computer wouldn’t boot at all last week after I disconnected an external usb drive running zfs. It showed the logo and just kind of stalled out. I had to use a recovery grub setting to disable zfs from the boot process.
This sort of routine breakage is pretty common. My rodecaster doesn’t have all its audio interfaces show up in the default audio devices list. HDMI audio broke last year from a kernel update. IntelliJ stopped scaling according to the HiDPI mode I have set up. And so on. It’s fine. It’s worth it for me. But it’s definitely less reliable than macOS or windows.
Yes, the free OS is occasionally worse than the trillion dollar companies product.
On my works laptop I had initially kept the corporate windows install on the original drive and installed Fedora on a second non drive.
I would fire up the windows machine once every other week for a few hours so it gets its updates. But every single time I would enter the firmware settings or boot Fedora the OS bootlocker would lock itself and force me to go to https://aka.ms/recoverykey to get a recovery key the next time I booted windows. Until one day it started not booting even after giving the correct key. Bitlocker basically bricked itself.
So don't tell me that windows is more usable. And this is even without tackling the non functionning parts of windows when it accepts to boot, like the broken keyboard for anyone not using english language that Microsoft never even tried to fix in more than 30 years. People used to laugh about a sliding date for linux to be "read for thr desktop" but windows has never been ready either.
Now, assume your hourly consulting rate is $200. You would only have to spend about 40 hours of time tinkering on linux before windows would have made more sense for the time/money equation.
Frustration is another economy that I think is even more important for getting things done. How badly do you actually want to build? Maintaining morale through the hard bits of the target problem domain is usually already a struggle. Why do you want to be fighting with boot loaders, drivers and arguments on various forums on top of all of that?
Kind of a weird basis for comparison when everyone seems to be talking about the desktop experience.
I love Linux for servers, but not for the desktop.
Conversations about the utility, costs, and feature sets of Windows vs. Linux. vs. macOS tend to ignore the reality that business conditions often dictate that you must use one or the other for a given use case. Sometimes you do have the option, and if you've already got an appreciable investment in one, then you tend to select for that one almost by default.
Free just means it did not cost you any money, a free hammer does not also imply a free new roof or whatever you want to build with it.
Linux is a tool, men use tools, be a man and use Linux.
Last week I reinstalled Windows on my work machine because the TPM was reset because I opened the case and all the MS account thingies got borked beyond repair.
Now there are a bunch of borken things. Like icons randomly disappearing in the taskbar (the button is still there and functional, but no icon). And every other time I boot it, something messes up the input language settings. It gets set to US English, although that layout doesn't show up in the enabled languages in the settings app. I have to add it and remove it to unbreak this.
And then there's my gaming box, which worked OK for a few months, but now something happened with the BitLocker screen and there's no more text, just the blue screen. If I type in my pin, it actually works.
I am fine with fedora on my main and professional laptop because they are used almost daily and then are kept updated regularly. And honestly I had one small breakage in 10 years and I could just boot with the previously installed kernel for a week until the problem was fixed so it wasn't that big of a deal.
I have another computer that serve as a streaming box in my leaving room connected to my video projector. I use this one much less frequently, especially in summer so I don't want to have to spend a lot of time doing updates. For this one I decided to install almalinux. Since it is a very long term support distro it only receive security updates and major bug fixes so it is very reliable, the kernel version is well tested and the frequency of system update is very low.
In the past, people would have complained these distro were lacking important newer versions for their own usage and needs. This is not an issue anymore with flatpaks, container tools, distrobox, VMs + that trend of dev/devopa software installed on your homedir directly via curl | bash or some versions manager like nvm, sdkman, pyenv. Nowadays you can use the very latest versions of software on top of a dinosaur.
I'd much rather a "native" linux distro that has a reasonably modern kernel, with support for io_uring and recent nvidia drivers. And I want a good, modern window manager with hidpi support. And I need to be able to install modern compilers, toolchains and software - like rustc, intellij, nodejs, spotify, firefox, davinci resolve, zfs, automatic1111 and so on.
Maybe these problems wouldn't show up as much with another distro? But if I spend time distro shopping to avoid tinkering with mint, I'm worried I'll end up wasting more time doing that than I would save. Most of the bugs I've run into with mint are actually bugs in ubuntu, that mint is based on. Is fedora / arch / etc really more stable than ubuntu? If I use a dinosaur, I'm worried I'll then need to work around its issues - can I easily install modern lldb on an old distro with an ancient glibc? I've tried that before, and it was a huge headache.
Can't give you a definite answer on that, I am quite happy with Fedora but only using ZFS on my almalinux and freebsd system and my only experience with Ubuntu in recent years were LTS releases on servers and that was pre v20.
I remember that the kernel changed something a few years ago that broke openzfs and it took time to get back support on some distros so I would be afraid the kernel break something and force me to avoid kernel security upgrades while it is worked on if I was relying on it on a Fedora.
I believe running nvidia hardware and ZFS, or anything that is not using a driver included in the mainline kernel, is unsuitable for a distro running fairly recent kernels if you care about potential breakage. That is what LTS distro are for.
One alternative to super bleeding edge distro such as Arch is to use something like opensuse slowroll which is a kind of hybrid model between standard and rolling release. Every month or so it gets an upgrade to the lastest snapshot from the OpenSuse Tumbleweed rolling release and between each snapshot it only gets security updates correcting major bugs or CVEs. I only have used it for a few weeks in a VM but I guess if a major breakage would impact tumbleweed you would continue getting security updates until tumbleweed is fixed. But I have no idea if OpenSuse is an openzfs friendly shop, I think they are full on btrfs adoption instead.
> If I use a dinosaur, I'm worried I'll then need to work around its issues - can I easily install modern lldb on an old distro with an ancient glibc? I've tried that before, and it was a huge headache.
When I say a dinosaur, I was exagerating. For example all the toolchains and software you mention in your posts are perfectly usable on a long term distro such as almalinux 9. I can't speak about nvidia because I don't have any machine with it but Almalinux is a better proposal for openzfs. Nodejs is easily installed through nvm, I am using the most recent firefox, librewolf and ungoogled chrommum from the flatpaks, etc. It is not using an old glibc.
Apparently lldb is part of almalinux 9 but I have no idea if the version is modern enough for your use case: https://almalinux.pkgs.org/9/almalinux-appstream-x86_64/lldb...
But as said before, you are just 2 commands away from a more recent Fedora toolbox available at your keyboard fingertips [1]:
$ toolbox create --distro fedora --release 40 $ toolbox enter fedora-toolbox-40
[1] and distrobox is available as a package on EPEL repos so you would have an arch or ubuntu available easily the same way.
I've seen posts like yours a million times, and they can always be summed up as "no mantainer actually uses the default setup for more than a few hours before removing anything that could cause a conflict between nominally unrelated packages".
I say this as a professional software engineer who works on a Linux VM 8 hours a day plus off work.
I then booted up Fedora KDE 40, and installed it with 0 issues or tinkering. Have been using it ever since and it has been working flawlessly.
HiDPI support is more than a bit sketchy still, especially on nvidia, and especially if you attach multiple screens to the computer and don't want all of them to have the same scaling.
Webcam support is also still quite sketchy. It'll work, but actually configuring the thing to e.g. select the resolution or adjust the white balance, feels like a regression to 2004.
I failed to mention in the initial comment that I am refferring to Windows Server, but I got triggered by “we’re removing the lasr useful bits of Windows configuration options”.
The default is the new settings app and you have to be very persistent if you want Control Panel options. Everything is oversimplified and dumbed down.
My example with network settings: Removing useful admin info for no reason.
I don't want to use it. I am forced by my employer.
If you're tech savvy and push for FOSS in your org then you're the one on the hook whenever that SW fails or some coworker gets it to fail because now it's YOUR responsibility. But if MS Office fails than it's not your fault, it's Microsoft's, or Crowdstrike's, or whatever $BIG_CORP you bought it from.
Most people want a chill 9-5 and aren't willing to die on that hill for the sake of pushing FOSS religiousness. Martyrism isn't rewarded. You want something where you can outsource the risk to away from you, so that you can always go home early.
Why do you think Google uses SAP. Do you think they can't develop their own alternative on site? But why bother?
Because I'm Windows power user (30+ years of experience) and novice on MacOS and Linux? Doesn't that count for something? It's not that alternative OSes are terrible, they're just terrible for me. I use shortcuts without thinking, I use TotalCommander all the time and no, there are no 100% replacements that I can just install and continue using with all shortcuts I'm used to. I use Home/End/PgDown/PgUp all the time, and not only that MacBook doesn't have these, it doesn't even have Delete key (opposite of backspace), which I find mind-boggling.
Sorry about little rant. I'm sure people are very productive using MacOS or Linux. But I'm super productive on Windows, everything just flies without thinking. Oh, btw. I'm typing this on MacBook which is a wonderful piece of hardware, and I use it a lot, but even after a year I feel like my hands are tied behind my back when working on it.
I think it's ok for a guy to have his preferences without been judged by his fellow developers. I though we're behind judging for personal preferences in 2024?
AFAIK there's nothing stopping you from writing software that pulls config info from an ini file. Has something changed?
Edit: I think I've edited ini files to configure video games somewhat recently.
How about using a DOS prompt recently?
I host my command prompt inside a 3rd party program, but I still use the Windows command prompt all the time. I think that's pretty normal for "power users" who haven't moved on to PowerShell (I use PS when I have to, but it's not my go-to).
You can write a Linux program that pulls from an INI file or a 3rd party DOS program on MacOS, the question is how this stuff is relevant to being a power Windows user.
What's the API for that look like? In Win32 it's GetPrivateProfileString.
the question is how this stuff is relevant to being a power Windows user.
I gave you an example. I guess you're not aware that many desktop applications continue to support ini files, even if it's not the first line of configuration anymore.
DOS has similarly been stripped from Windows but 3rd party DOS shells exist on many platforms. Honestly knowing Bash is more Windows specific at this point than DOS. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install
So again, none of your examples are Windows specific at this point.
Huh? DOS != Command line interpreter or shell. DOS per se hasn't existed for decades, but the command line (Command Prompt) lives on, using pretty much the same syntax.
Honestly knowing Bash is more Windows specific at this point than DOS.
Bash is more Windows-specific than "DOS"?! That makes no sense whatsoever.
I am well aware of INI files being used by applications on several operating systems.
What are you even talking about now? You started the whole ini discussion with "Remember .ini files? Yea how relevant is that today?" So it went from irrelevant to relevant across platforms?
On windows 11 using Microsoft only tools you can list every file in a directory using ls or dir. But Bash is by far a more powerful tool than command prompt making it far more relevant for a power user than some legacy syntax.
> So it went from irrelevant to relevant across platforms?
The point INI files and DOS come up but aren’t some Windows specific knowledge at this point.
There's no DOS prompt of course, but I use the command prompt almost every working day. I have started using wsl bash more and more though.
this is very much not the same thing especially since you can still find non systemd distros but really, systemd is neither a new nor abrupt nor unilateral change
Linux is not "doing the same thing" except inasmuch that everything that doesn't die changes over time
Fn + Delete, deletes forwards
Command + arrow keys moves cursor to beginning/end of paragraph/doc. Option jumps by word. And you can combine them with Shift for selection.
Spacebar scrolls a full page.
If you want the actual Home/End/PgDown/PgUp you can get them by combining Fn with arrow or F keys, depending on your keyboard, but I never use them.
That was just one example of why I don't feel at home on Mac. But TotalCommander must be #1 thing I miss. I investigated several Mac file managers, settled for Crax Commander, but I'm so spoilled by TC that nothing comes close.
As far as devices, Microsoft makes the Surface. The fact that you didn't mention it speaks volumes about how successful it has been.
The casual computer experience on Apple is absolutely unbeatable. It's not even close. I can't stand to do anything even remotely technical on these machines though.
I spend about 50/50 time on windows and apple these days. Windows for work/building & MacOS/iOS for entertainment, personal notes, kitchen internet appliance, socializing, HN, etc. I actually don't like to use HN on my windows PC (on iPhone right now).
I like the mental separation between the two. I can feel my blood pressure drop when I move from my sweaty nerd workstation to my MacBook or iPhone.
Windows is a toy for me, its not a tool I’d ever willing use for productivity or business, that’s left to OSX, Linux etc.
It just helps to not cross the streams, which when your job is computing and your hobbies involve computing helps, or at least I feel it does. I can’t use a nix os without it feeling like my day job.
Ironically when I worked in PC repair, it was the other way around, I couldn’t bare to look at windows when I got home.
Many companies have basically reached perfection (or at least as good as it's going to get), but they still need to justify their existence. Another example of this is Osprey backpacks. If you bought one in the last couple of decades then it's basically all the same. But what they do is keep churning out new designs year on year, all 90% the same but they wiggle around that line of perfection ensuring some years have something good but also something bad that they can improve on next time (despite the fact the "improvement" is just from the design of 3 years back). This has been Microsoft's model also for a long time now.
The trouble is there's an implied maintenance contract as the environment the software exists in only gets more hostile even if your consumer customers rarely pay for it with new licenses. Plus an expectation that you upgrade their facilities/APIs to facilitate new tech other companies have come up with in the ecosystem that gives their 'stage' value, that HDR lighting rig they want to use for their performance or new USB/networking/3D rendering/etc standard.
Each network card configuration dialogue has a box for "default gateway". As a result an entire generation of people have some very strange ideas about how routing works for a host with more than one network interface. That UI has persisted since at least Win 95 and Win NT.
Christmas tree UX. Navigating the UI at places is like playing a RPG with all the weird intricate click paths.
A while back I was messing with IPv6, trying to get it to work my desktop the way I wanted it to, and ended up in a situation where I needed to change both settings that existed only in the new Settings app and settings that existed only in Control Panel, and after a while the Settings app just started throwing an error when trying to save IP settings. The entire thing is a mess.
A simple thing I find infuriating is that the entire 'app' is a singleton. I can't have one window open in one submenu with another window in another submenu, despite no direct relation.
Every OS I regularly lose seems to have lost track of the value of multitasking. Perhaps a side effect of them being treated as a tool to launch a browser.
I think the real problem is that Microsoft hasn't place enough focus on getting the Settings app correct from a UI/UX perspective like Apple did with their Settings app. There's nothing technical preventing them from offering a streamlined experience in Settings that allows you to easily configure advanced settings when necessary. It's just design effort on their part.
If they can get their Settings app to the point where nobody wants to use Control Panel anymore, then that's the right time to deprecate it.
Apple completely changed its app in one go. There was no plan B, no deprecation. For this reason, the app is not has pristine as it should, with a ton of sections simply brought over without changes.
Microsoft being Microsoft, they’ve chosen to inflict decades of juggling two apps on their users, with poor results.
I'm not surprised to see all the negative reactions. The old stuff was pure Win32 and thus very efficient in many ways. The new stuff is all UWP from what I understand (and UWP is itself supposedly deprecrated for several years now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28932345), and much more abstracted and inefficient despite still being native code(?)
I still remember the first time I opened Settings and saw a loading screen, which spent over a second to load a UI that somehow looks even less complete than the one in Windows 1.0, on a system with several orders of magnitude faster CPU and more RAM:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29586970
The software industry has been on a quality decline for over a decade. This is just another datapoint in that sad trend.
I HATE the "Settings" crap. It's horrible. Fucking mess find anything. Half the functionality of the control panel applets are still not implemented. You essentially can't do more than one settings task at a time.
I seriously want to stab whoever thought this was a good idea on the face.