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Comment by i80and | Hacker News Reader

This sort of thing has been a devolving disaster since the Settings App was included in Windows 8 as a partial replacement for the Control Panel. I'm not sure the current state of things, but as of the last time I used Windows, the sets of functionality remained only partially overlapping between the two different tools.

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The partial overlap has been in this state now for years and years. I still have to access the control panel for network device control, sound control, and some of the advanced sharing settings. I thought it would be a short transition but now we just have crappy partial duplicates of settings and ui styles scattered around this half baked migration. When I open the disk volume management it's like I'm back on Windows 2000 for some reason.

Regular volume management can be done entirely within the Settings app. So can sound settings. There's probably an outlier that diskmgmt does better, I'm sure. But diskpart still exists, too. It could be that MSFT targets only the common scenarios and the fallback ends up being old utils/PowerShell at some point.

This was new in 2025, so it is still moving over.

As far as I know, to modify the audio Exclusive Mode settings and view jack information, you still need to use mmsys.cpl from the Control Panel. And I think many operations like converting MBR to GPT still require the Disk Management control panel.

You're correct, and those are likely all little-used in the grand scheme of Windows users (MBR -> GPT for certain).

Waving it away as little-used features is not an excuse, it's the entire reason things got this way. That's why we have layers upon layers of half baked UI with "only" the controls that "everyone" needs. Because those rationalizations are wrong and this is the result.

> That's why we have layers upon layers of half baked UI with "only" the controls that "everyone" needs.

But this is the future. Layers over layers of abstraction. The main idea is to make the attacker give up.

I would expect Microsoft to relegate little used features to CLI rather than figure out how to integrate them into the UX.

Depends if they want their OS to be easy to use with wide appeal like macOS, or a CLI nightmare like Arch.

And seeing as Windows is now a nightmare, and I am a technical person, I’ve moved everything to Linux.

Everything is still harder to get set up right on Linux, but it stays right. I’ve also found the LLM’s dramatically shorten the time required to configure things I don’t have experience with.

MS have abandoned their power users, and the power users (some of them at least), are abandoning MS. I keep Windows around in a VM for work purposes; never had a better setup! I’m in complete control of my PC again.

I have to use xattr -c on every "untrusted" binary in macOS just in order to run it. So much for easy to use with wide appeal...

Somehow macOS only has one System Settings app. (They did admittedly make a mess of it lately, but in an entirely different way than Windows.) And yes, they relegate a lot of advanced stuff to the Terminal.

Honestly I always hope that what I try to do, is still possible with the old Control Panel, since there I at least get understandable descriptions and can actually change things instead of the marketing speech and locked down settings in that abomination called "Settings app".

Oh but nowadays you have to access the old Control Panel only to access advanced options, like... setting the actions for lid close and power button, apparently.

But Microsoft is a small business which just cannot afford to have two versions of interfaces for clearly distinct modes of interaction: touch and mouse-based. They had no other choice except trying to merge things together.

It's still the same, more stuff got converted too the settings app, some stuff is still in the old control panel.

It's ridiculous how long this is taking really.

13 years... Longer than the time between Windows 2000 and Windows 8.

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