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Comment by 0cf8612b2e1e | Hacker News Reader

You don’t enjoy the modern white space heavy configuration to be split almost multiple pages? Win10, I have to scroll to see the entire sound options on a single non-exhaustive page given the comically low information density.

The new pages seem designed by someone who only knew how to build a vertical layout and just stacked all controls without a care for the user. I am also amused how the modern window takes a good second plus to paint.

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My favorite part is how you can now only have a single page open in all of settings. Have a blocking dialogue box open? Too bad for you if you want to change literally anything else, gotta wait!

Or heaven forbid you want to check your network settings and your printer settings at the same time!

Or how the network settings pages often don’t even have basic network information on it, so you literally can’t even use the supposed debug page to actually diagnose even the most basic network issues!

Specifically Windows 11? Is that due to bugs, or intentional redesign?

I've never found any way on the Windows 10 network page to configure, troubleshoot, or display diagnostic network information. I have to go the 'old' one that is more like what was present in Vista & 7.

What information are you specifically seeking that you aren’t finding on that page?

I think you're supposed to use Recall for that now. Open the network settings, then switch to printer settings and ask the LLM what your network settings were.

It's a much more elegant solution than multiple windows in Windows!

This design is very human.

I really hope that's a joke, hard to tell these days with AI-bros spouting similar nonsense ;)

windows then: "we show you all the guts in a window and hope you click the right things

windows now: "we hope your prompt engineering is strong, that is our only interface"

This right here. Unfortunately it's just a symptom of Windows (and most things) not being designed for the power user/administrator.

The one knobs and dials will probably be retained, but only in the Enterprise version and Windows Server. That's how they segment the userbase these days. Home and Pro are for dummies.

What is worst even Windows Server is not being designed for power user/ administrator.

Yeah I can do lots of stuff with powershell but lots of time I just want to run app wiz.cpl because new one doesn’t show all stuff that is installed. Let alone network settings new screens being useless.

I doubt the interface is any good for normal user as well.

The UX designers don't care for it to be actually usable, they just want the standard UX/UI ideas of whitespace and stuff looking good without thoughts how the features are actually used.

This 100%. And I fear it's a full-blown problem in design ethos generally. We're looking to remodel the kitchen and three designers have presented different, very beautiful concepts... Without any practical long-term consideration to real-world usability

Indeed, and this seems to be pervasive in UI design as a whole. Until not long ago, designers created palletes of styles and components to be used by programmers. Now they draw entire screens and deliver the drawings to the programmers. This puts too much decision power in the hands of a group that don't have a clear view of the requirements and development costs -- and I have serious doubts about their understanding of "user experience" as well. Like you said, it feels that their artistic conceptions trumps anything else

Maybe they should rename the operating system from "Microsoft Windows" to "Microsoft Window".

Microsoft Win Dough

They seem to copy Android heavily. Android is also a single tasking OS with a lot of TSRs. /s

That's a problem with a lot of modern desktop UIs. The industry has somehow unlearned how to use multiple windows. Everything is a tablet app in a single window now.

The ultra modern solution: just remove settings until they can all fit in a single window. And then remove a few more.

But keep the removed ones available to determined enough users through undocumented registry keys and "defaults write" commands.

What's actually mind boggling to me is that after so many years windows still uses plenty of badly formatted unresizable windows. Also no way to pin a window to top (in Z-order) even though we've had that on Linux for at least a quarter of century

I think all these pages are designed to work on Windows Phone. MSFT tried to have a single UI for both computers and phone. Around 2010. Ubuntu tried the same thing. With similar results. We are still stuck with Microsoft's effort.

Of course, they only know how to build a single vertical layout. They’re used to building apps or sites aimed at smartphones, which are the only devices, right?

> I am also amused how the modern window takes a good second plus to paint.

The number of pixels is increased since the days of Windows 3.1. Even notepad needs a couple of seconds to draw its empty window on a new mashine. /s

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