Hacker News Reader

Comment by _fat_santa | Hacker News Reader

The issue I see with Windows 11's UI is they seem to focus too much on pushing new apps / features and not enough focus on catching up some of the older tools within Windows. Take for example the Control Panel which is a reskinned version of the same one that shipped with Windows 7. And I'm sure there are tools buried within the OS that probably date back to the 2000/XP days.

Windows 11 looks great if you just look at the press photos and stay a "very happy path" while using it but as soon as you start digging deeper you realize it's like that meme of Homer Simpson with clips on his back.

View on HN

You forgot our favourite windows 3.1 file dialog:

https://youtu.be/r549Zn74Xg8

Yikes!

Though nothing from Apple in 1993 still runs.

Control Panel is definitely a bad example, I do see them working little by little, update by update, to integrate everything into Settings

It's been like 10 years since that settings panel came out with Windows 8. How many more years until it's done?

It's done when you're not visiting old control panel anymore. I wonder what people are even doing regularly enough in control panel for that to be such a problem.

I don't use them terribly often, but one thing that old control panel windows did was pack a lot of information into a small amount of space.

Device Manager has that nice tree setup allowing me to see problematic devices a lot quicker.

Drive management has that nice table of physical devices on the top and then partitions on the bottom.

The old-school network adapter page shows me every network device in a single window, real or virtual, and I can mess around with their settings a lot faster with right-click properties.

And of course the services manager allows me to make sure that certain services arent running, like Windows search indexing - I use voidtools Everything instead.

That said, those tend to be the exceptions and not the rules. I've actually been quite pleased with the progression of the settings window over the course of Windows 10 and 11. A special shout out to the new fonts page as it is light years better than what came before.

Funny, I recently wanted to uninstall a bunch of fonts I tested for programming. Turns out, in the new font settings widget you cannot uninstall all fonts or even all styles of a font at once. I would have needed to select a font, then click "Uninstall" for the bold style, the semibold style, the medium style, the italic bold style etc.

Opening \Windows\Fonts instead gives you a nice view of all fonts, you Ctrl-select all you want, right click, uninstall, done.

I do agree they didn’t do much in the 8/10 days but definitely feels like there’s a big push since 11

I mean business or corpo world literally force microsoft to support backward compability

in fairness rewrite it from scratch is literally easier than supporting compability since dawn of times but they forced to do it

last time I used Sql Server Management studio the "add database dialog" still had that poorly placed button that its had since its release.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com